Hi folks. I've been quiet for a while, life and all that. However, I've
bumped into something that has been a bit of a sore spot for a while.
Automatic command completion in scripts. I'd, personally, like to see it
banished from the face of the earth.
If you're not familiar with the feature, it's the feature that turns "/ali"
into "/alias" (as long as no other aliases/commands start with 'ali').
Before anyone gets too excited, I don't mean for command completion to go
away *on the command line*. That's a useful feature, and one which I think
should stay. What I'm talking about relates purely to the execution of
aliases in scripts.
The problem, as I see it, is twofold:
#1: I think there are substantial speed benefits to be gained by removing
this code. It will obviate the need for sorting, and will make the use of
hash-based lookups trivial.
#2: I think epic is violating POLA (principle of least astonishment) by
doing this at all. Imagine the case of a program who does the following:
alias ali {
echo auto litigation system enabled
# ...
}
ali ...
Now imagine if they accidently mis-type 'ali' (say, as 'alli') and execute
their script. One would *expect* that doing "ali ..." will result in a
"command not found" error. That's not the result, however. Assuming an
otherwise clean running area, the user's script will actually execute the
alias command with the given arguments.
So what I'd like to do here is find out what people think of this proposal.
Of especial interest is the response from scripters about whether this is
good, bad, or neither, and also whether their scripts need any work for
this to be done. Basically, does anyone actually want this behavior to
remain, and if you do, can you explain why?
If nobody actually wants to keep this, I would propose that as part of my
namespace work it be removed and, either then or at a later date, a new
lookup system for aliases/assigns be introduced.
-wd
--
chip norkus; unix geek and programmer; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"question = (to) ? be : !be;" --Shakespeare http://telekinesis.org/
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