Re: do I win the "most pointless use of ZSH" award? ;)

["Bart Schaefer" <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On May 2, 11:26pm, Bruce Stephens wrote:
> Subject: Re: do I win the "most pointless use of ZSH" award? ;)
> "Bart Schaefer" <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > > 	for (( p=0.0, q=0.0, i=0 ; p*p+q*q < 4 && i < 32 ; i++));do
> 
> I couldn't get this to work for a while.  It turned out one of my
> initialization scripts was setting i to an absolute pathname:

Alan's code was intended to be run as a script, not as a shell function.
To make a shell function of it, you should add:

	local lines columns colour a b p q i pnew

at the top.

>         zsh% i=/foo; for ((i=0; i<10; i++)) echo $i
>         zsh: bad math expression: operand expected at `/foo'
> 
> Is this a bug or a feature that I'm entirely missing?

It's a feature.  The value of any parameter that appears in math context
is evaluated as an expression (up to a maximum recursion depth, I forget
what just now).  So

	i=foo/bar
	((i))

is the same as

	((foo/bar))

and so on for the values of `foo' and `bar'.