> -----Original Message-----
> From: Roger Marquis [mailto:marquis@roble.com]
> Sent: Monday, June 23, 2008 9:11 PM
> To: Glenn Fowler
> Cc: austin-group-l@opengroup.org
> Subject: Re: Austin Interps 211
>
> > (2) adding a sh(1) feature, already implemented in { bash ksh zsh },
> > that does not introduce the printf(3) incompatibility, and solved
> > the problem for all utilities
>
> Would that not introduce an incompatibility between older and newer
> versions of /bin/sh?
Obviously, but that is the price of progress.
> Would scripts using the new feature
> break on older
> OSs? That, in a nutshell and IMO, is what a /bin/sh
> standard should most
> avoid.
POSIX surely has a way of figuring out at shell level to which version
of the standard a system complies to, so careful application writers who
care about this can test this and act appropriately.
Whether { bash ksh zsh dash tcsh csh } implement the
> feature is
> relatively tangental.
No, because on many systems, bash or ksh are the de facto /bin/sh
implementations. Thus, scripts written for these systems automatically
benefit from the proposed extension (in that they suddenly become POSIX
compliant), whereas adding new syntax to printf(1) requires all such
scripts to be rewritten.
Konrad Schwarz
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