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From: Chet Ramey <chet.ramey@case.edu>
Newsgroups: gnu.bash.bug
Subject: Re: Undocumented for-loop construct
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2020 09:36:30 -0400
Organization: ITS, Case Western Reserve University
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Cc: chet.ramey@case.edu, bug-bash@gnu.org
To: "Dale R. Worley" <worley@alum.mit.edu>, Klaas Vantournhout <klaas.vantournhout@gmail.com>
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On 8/6/20 10:29 PM, Dale R. Worley wrote:
> Klaas Vantournhout <klaas.vantournhout@gmail.com> writes:
>> Recently I came across a surprising undocumented bash-feature
>>
>>    $ for i in 1 2 3; { echo $i; };
>>
>> The usage of curly-braces instead of the well-documented do ... done
>> construct was a complete surprise to me and even lead me to open the
>> following question on stack overflow:
> 
> Interesting!  Looking at parse.y, it looks like do ... done can be
> replaced with { ... } in 'for' and 'select' statements, but not 'while'
> and 'until' statements.  

The `select' syntax is enough like `for' -- practically identical from a
grammar perspective -- that it made sense to support it in `select'. The
fact that the Korn shell supports braces in `select' made it a
compatibility issue as well.


Not clear why that would be, though I haven't
> tried extending while/until and recompiling parse.y; maybe it doesn't
> work.

Because there's a difference between a `list' (for and select) and a
`command list' (while and until). If you don't want ambiguous constructs,
you nee a reserved word to separate the test command from the body
command.


-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/