On Sat, Sep 13, 2025 at 10:55:06 -0400, Lawrence Velázquez wrote: > Yeah, I misunderstood how locale_setblanks [1] works. Its function > comment is: > > Set every character in the <blank> character class to be a > shell break character for the lexical analyzer when the > locale changes. > > But it seems to only consider 0x00 through 0xFF, which are tabulated > into syntax.c at build time [2].
I really think this is a bad idea. A script needs to have predictable behavior regardless of what bizarre locales may exist on the target system. (I'm obviously not talking about different error messages and so on -- that's fine.) Parsing something differently at the syntax level because "q" is a blank in some locale would just be horrible. I'm guessing the intent was to make it comfortable for someone to *write* scripts (for personal use) using the natural features of their own locale, but this falls apart extremely quickly once you consider that a script may be shared or distributed across locale boundaries.
