Re: [BUG] Illegal function names are accepted after being used as aliases

[Harald van Dijk <harald@gigawatt.nl>]

On 23/02/2016 20:33, Eric Blake wrote:
> exit - fuzzy.  exit is a special built-in (unlike getopts); and XCU 2.14
> states:
>
>   "Some of the special built-ins are described as conforming to XBD
> Utility Syntax Guidelines. For those that are not, the requirement in
> Utility Description Defaults that "--" be recognized as a first argument
> to be discarded does not apply and a conforming application shall not
> use that argument. "
>
> Conforming apps cannot expect 'exit -1' to work, and therefore, cannot
> also expect 'exit -- -1' to work, since the only standards-defined
> values for an argument to exit is a non-negative decimal integer less
> than 256.  Of course, if you want to fix it along with all the others,
> that's fine; I'm just pointing out that 'exit' isn't broken as-is.

I was under the impression that the intent from the dash side was to 
handle all commands the same, and that impression was based on the fact 
that the . command has received additional code to handle -- even though 
there's no requirement for that. However, looking into the original bug 
report that prompted that change in more detail I see that the standard 
will very likely require support for -- in the . command in the future, 
so that doesn't hold up.

If that intent isn't there (I'm not saying it's not; I'm unsure now), 
the list of utilities that should be extended is far smaller, if I'm not 
overlooking anything:
- alias
- getopts
- type
- exec?
- local?

exec is like .: there's currently no requirement to support --, but that 
requirement is likely to come in the future.

local is currently non-standard and it's hard to guess whether it will 
require support for -- if standardised.

Cheers,
Harald van Dijk