Re: Scripting (IMPORTANT!)

[Marco Gerards <mgerards@xs4all.nl>]

"Yoshinori K. Okuji" <okuji@enbug.org> writes:

> On Friday 13 October 2006 23:03, Marco Gerards wrote:
>> It's good you mention this, because it's exactly the discussion I want
>> to start.  The question here is: How do we want to deal with the
>> `for'?
>>
>> In bash it iterates over all arguments.  The wildcards are expanded by
>> the shell and thus it just has a look at its arguments.  The question
>> here is, do we want to deal with wildcards?  It makes the code more
>> complex and I think there is little gain.
>>
>> For GRUB I think some kind of iterators are more useful.  In that case
>> you can write a module to iterate over certain data.  For example over
>> files, disks, partitions, terminals or whatever.  It leaves the bash
>> syntax, but it is more useful in our case and modular.
>
> If you make this feature only for "for", the behavior would be not intuitive 
> for the user. For instance, if "echo" does not interpret wildcards, we would 
> hear the same question, "Why doesn't this work?", again and again. Also, It 
> sounds really ugly to interpret wildcards in each command.

Ok, that sounds sane.  But it does not address my problem.  How would
one iterate over disks and partitions.  And perhaps other things like
loaded modules, etc.  Personally I do not care a lot about syntax, but
I want the language to be full features so most end users can do what
they want.

--
Marco