Jari Aalto <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I take your word that some old shells may have had initial problems > with the $(), but does this hold true any more in practice in 2007?
The code I write still has to be portable, for various Stanford-internal reasons, to Solaris 8 /bin/sh, which is... weird. I don't know if it has problems with this in particular, but I also don't see any good reason to change my coding style when I know that `` works and when I know that a lot of apparently innocuous changes *do* break on platforms that I care about. > If I would compare the same thing with perl that > &functions() > is valid syntax as of Perl 2007, we would never change a thing move to > remove the extra "&". Perl 4 to Perl 5 changes are a bit of a different animal. Perl 5 is a completely different language; that's akin to using Perl 6 as an argument. > From QA perpective in Perl's case the removal of "&" in front of > function names is encourages because it make thinks more readable. I wouldn't remove it for that reason. I would remove it because it *means* something different. Using & circumvents prototypes, and using & without the parens is magical and does something significantly different from what one might expect. > I agree that `cmd` is widely recognized, but the other side of the coin > might be that in $()'s case: > - developers may not be aware of it, so they only use `` I don't see this as a problem. > - they stick to what they has "always used" because they're afraid > of a change (legend: "break thinngs...") I consider this a feature. If it's not broke, don't fix it. > - they might not be aware of how difficult it is to dinguish ` from '. They look significantly different on my screen. (I recommend xfonts-jmk and the neep font for a good fixed-width screen font. It's significantly more readablel than any other X screen font I've used, and it now has reasonable Unicode support.) It's a small character, admittedly, and is as easy to miss as comma vs. period, but, well, Unix has a long tradition of using lots of characters. > Back to the point. From QA perspective does "The Debian Project" not see > any value of encouraging $() ? I'm afraid I don't. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
