The `let ++` example is pretty damning. I find Bash to be a poor and outdated sh...

somat · on Oct 7, 2022

A lot of the sins of shell are from it's primary role as an interactive interface to the computer. it's use as a scripting language was a nice secondary goal.

On the one hand it is nice to have your interactive interface and your scripts be the same language. on the other it is a bit horrifying the way all those convenient interactive features make your programs so prone to failure.

justin_oaks · on Oct 7, 2022

We'd probably all be better off if our scripts weren't in the same language as used by our interactive interface. I do paste snippets of scripting (if, for, etc.) into my interactive terminal from time to time, but that's rare compared to just typing commands to run.

I wouldn't mind it if all scripting in the shell had to be offloaded to a completely separate language that was less error prone and more consistent.

ohiovr · on Oct 7, 2022

Interesting.. that might be part of why I fell in love with this ugly monster called Bash scripting.

trashtester · on Oct 7, 2022

> The `let ++` example is pretty damning.

Seems kind of logical, the following c code behaves the same way.

  #include <stdio.h>

  int test(void) {
          int i=0;
          return i++;
  }
  
  void main(void) {
          printf("i = %d\n", test());
  }

'let i++' evaluates to / returns 0 before increasing i, just like c would.

stevebmark · on Oct 8, 2022

I don't mean what it returns, I mean that returning non-zero trips up Bash into thinking it's a non-successful error code. The fact that doing math can trip up error detection implies a fundamental design flaw of the system. Which, I mean, we're in Bash, of course it's poorly designed. I didn't know it was quite this bad though.