On 9/20/07, David Korn <dgk at research.att.com> wrote:
> cc: rbtneville at gmail.com
> Subject: Re: [ksh93-integration-discuss] Dereferencing an array name reference
> --------
>
>
> > While educating myself about the new ksh features I stumbled over a
> > behaviour which I do not understand. The example below tries to
> > dereference a name reference but only returns the name of the variable
> > but not the array index:
> > % ksh93
> > $ typeset -A a
> > $ a[x]=5
> > $ nameref l=a[x]
> > echo "${!l}"'
> > a
> >
> > I expected a[x] as output. Is this a bug or do name references only
> > apply to variables and not their index?
> > --
> > robert neville - it consultant
>
>
> I will classify this as a bug and it also uncovers another bug
> or at least undocumented behavior.
How do nameref variables work internally? I had the impression that a
nameref variable only remembers the name of the variable and places
this string in place of the nameref name during execution.
> Currently,
> ${!x}
> should provide the name for variable x following references, so
> it should have displayed a[x] in this case. (I will fix this
> and also will not allow the [..] to be treated as a character class
> even if not quoted.
>
> Currently ${...@]} or ${!x[*]} expand to the subscripts (or 0 if x is
> not subscripted).
>
> However, the behavior of
> ${!x[foo]}
> is currently undocumented and currently outputs foo. This will be changed
Why do you think that this is undocumented? I'd expect that if x is an
element in an array [foo] describes the 2nd dimension, expanding to
a[x][foo]. Or am I wrong?
--
robert neville - it consultant
