Greg Wooledge <g...@wooledge.org> writes:
> Now, the big question is WHY you thought something which is not correct.
>
> The most common reasons that people think something which is wrong are:
In my experience, a common reason is that the documentation does not
concentrate in one place that users are certain to read, a complete,
clear description of the situation. For instance, you give a complete,
clear description:
Bash uses "dynamic scope" when it expands variables. This means that
it looks first in the current functions local variables; if the variable
isn't found there, it looks in the caller's local variables, and then
in the caller's caller's local variables, and so on, until it reaches
the global scope.
And that behavior is implied if you read the definition of "local"
closely. But I couldn't find any text in the manual page that states
that directly. (*Very* closely, as the text refers to "the function and
its children". But function definitions don't nest; what it means is
"the function *invocation* and its child invocations.) In principle it
should be stated at the point where parameter expansion is introduced,
as it is the *definition* of what parameter expansion does.
Dale
