Re: wrong error msg

[Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/03/17 08:21 AM, Bart Schaefer wrote:


It gets to be a rather deep subject Sensei, probably not right for the 
list, but my interest in the subject is profound, tho I come at it from 
the study of language in general not programming languages per se.
> Well, no, that's not really it.  The trouble here is that your "natural"
> parse is wrong,

I'd say that 'natural' is whatever folks would be expected to do, and 
I'd assert that 'my way' is what most folks would do and that any 
consistent rule could be used, so nothing is 'wrong' a priori, tho of 
course it might not be the rule actually used!  (Unless of course my 
'natural' parse cannot ever be consistent!)
> C does not allow nesting of visually-indistinguishable tokens, so this
> can't arise there.

That's an excellent point.  Indeed we use quotes with the same presumed 
syntactic effect as {}[]() even tho, as you say, they are not visually 
different.  So whereas *we* know what we mean, the parser has no ability 
to mind-read.  Which makes nesting of quote marks necessarily illegal.  
It's merely theoretical at this point, perhaps that does defeat my view 
of this.  Anyway, I understand what zsh is doing now which is what is 
relevant here.
> Hmm, you could force interactive mode to syntax-check your script like
> this:
>
>    zsh -o interactivecomments +o banghist -fnis < scriptfile
>    % dquote braceparam dquote> zsh: unmatched "
>    % %
>
> but you'll get a LOT of output.
Deep magic.  Too deep for an innocent like me.

>