Re: [Bashdb-devel] munge_list

[R. B. <ro...@pa...>]

Masatake informs:
> I'm reading readarray.c.
>
> I have two questions.
>
> 1. Is the function provided by munge_list needed anyway?

Well, it's used as the first statement of readarray_builtin. But is it
really, really *needed*? Gee, I don't know. One could argue that
readarray altogether is not needed. For example SuSE packman packages
bashdb, and it doesn't use readarray. :-)

The form of that option models how head and tail work, e.g.:
  head -10 /etc/motd

>    I'd like to remove because this option parsing policy(function)
>    is not widly used in bash.

Ok. If there's someone out there that objects, that's why there's this
mailling list. A guess is that there isn't much use of readarray
outside of bashdb. So as long as bashdb still works without my having
to patch it (but I don't mind if however you do the patching should
there need to be any), I don't mind.

>
> 2. What does the * stand for in the following doc string:
>
>    "readarray [-t] [-c *count*] [-C callback] [-n *lines*] [-O *origin*] *file* *array_variable*"
>
>    `*'s are needed in *count*, *lines*, *origin*, *file* and *array_variable*?

This was to indicate a variable - something which is not typed in
exactly but represents the kind of thing you'd type in. For example, not
the string "*count*" but some sort of number, like 10. The use of
putting a word surrounded by asterisks to indicate an italicized word
I think was common in mailing lists like this one (See the first
paragraph of my reply above) and in older forms of email before the
days of HTML and other encodings.

>    I'd like to remove it because this notation is not popular
>    in bash.

Sure. 

> Tell me the backgrounds if there are.

I am not sure I understand exactly what you mean here; but with luck
I've done that somewhere in the above verbiage.