On 20 February 2018 at 14:23, Eli Schwartz <eschwartz@archlinux.org> wrote:
On 02/20/2018 06:59 AM, Emil Velikov wrote:
Disclaimer: the following is a bit subtle topic, so I hope it doesn't spur a lot of off-topic.
Eh, I don't mind.
Is there any performance or other technical benefit to using more bashisms?
Reason being, that I am slowly going through different parts of Arch making it zsh friendly. While keeping the code brief and legible, of course. Guessing that I've picked the wrong hobby?
I think you'll probably find that few people write zsh scripts for non-interactive use. I'm not really sure what the point would be, considering it has a nonstandard syntax (bash is ubiquitous, zsh is not), and many people who would know bash would not know zsh (like me for example).
AFAIK zsh should more or less run either bash or POSIX sh scripts just fine if you invoke it via a symlink named `sh` or `bash`, because zsh has a bash compatibility mode. I have no idea whether that bash compatibility mode fixes subtle things like the fact that zsh arrays are 1-indexed while bash arrays are 0-indexed, but if I had to guess, probably not.
...
I can see some compelling reasons to write scripts targeting POSIX sh as a baseline, which is being *sh* friendly, not zsh friendly. But, for projects that make heavy use of bashisms anyways, I dislike using POSIX because it implies that sh will be supported in any way when it really won't be. Essentially, I prefer to go "all in".
As for why you'd want them, bashisms generally look cleaner IMHO, and they add a great deal of power and flexibility to the shell. Things like [[ ... ]] are just a lot more sane in basically every way, shell arithmetic uses proper operators, etc.
Seems like I wasn't clear enough: The goal is not to appease zsh - but a step closer to POSIX sh friendly. I've been staring and writing bash (closer to POSIX sh really) scripts for over a decade, haven't seen what makes X cleaner over Y. Yet that's subjective, unlike the original argument - consistency rules ;-) Thanks Emil