Re: PATCH and more remarks on parameter expansion docs

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 3,  7:28am, Han Pingtian wrote:
} Subject: Re: PATCH and more remarks on parameter expansion docs
}
} On Wed, Jan 02, 2013 at 08:46:44AM -0800, Bart Schaefer wrote:
} > 
} >      Note that splitting is applied to WORD in the assignment forms of
} >      SPEC _before_ the assignment to NAME is performed.  This affects
} >      the result of array assignments with the A flag.
} 
} I think it doesn't say this splitting _before_ assignments is only true
} when (A) is used. Looks like if (A) wasn't used, splitting will _after_
} the assignments

Ah, I see.  OK, I agree that it's imprecise about this.  It's imprecise
but not in the way that you think:  The splitting is in fact done before
the assignment in either case, but at that point the internals have both
the expanded string and the split result available.  The (A) flag then
determines which of those two values is used in the assignment.

I'm not sure whether in practice this can ever have a visible effect.  In
theory if there were some oddity with the syntax of WORD that caused the
splitting step to fail, then the NAME parameter would not be assigned,
but I can't trivially produce an example.

On the other hand, when does this "mistake" in the documentation matter?
Given what it says, what did you expect ${=xx::=foo   bar} to assign?

The doc needs to strike a balance between giving so much detail that it's
confusing and too little to tell the user what to expect.