Re: path PATH

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 7:57 AM Ray Andrews <rayandrews@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Ha!  I tried everything but the simplest thing.  But that begs the
> question of what 'hideval' really achieves if in fact it's not hidden at
> all.

hideval was introduced as an internal attribute to avoid having the
large/hard-to-read contents of module-provided arrays (like $aliases,
$parameters and especially $functions) spewed out in a wall of text
when the user was not expecting it.

Later, someone else said this would be useful for situations like
global variables used to cache data across function invocations, where
the user doesn't need to know the details of the function
implementation -- so -H was added to typeset.

In short, you shouldn't use it yourself unless you have a known
reason, and if somebody else used it, it means they don't want you to
be nosy.