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Re: coloring substitution seems to eat next line.




On 2022-11-11 20:24, Bart Schaefer wrote:
I've never heard the term "glossary" applied to something like that.


True, as I muse I expand the idea from a glossary to a primer to a grammar.

This is a glossary:
https://homepages.uc.edu/~thomam/Intro_Unix_Text/Glossary.html

That looks really good, I'm going to scan it end to end.   Even if it was nothing  more, something like that focused on zsh -- or I guess just 'shell' -- terminology would be invaluable to someone like me.  Probably was something like that at one time but its fallen by the wayside since, as I said, raw beginners are now so rare.  Really, how many people at my level are there now?   I just decided to dive in at the deep end and learn to swim by not drowning.  Inside out -- solve one problem at a time, and hope that the grammar would reveal itself eventually.  Nope, the grammar is too terse, too powerful.  Latin and Greek are 'C' by comparison.

But you seem to want something more like the whole book:
How about https://homepages.uc.edu/~thomam/Intro_Unix_Text/TOC.html

(Or at least everything from Chapter 9 and later.)
Nope, we already have 'the whole book' that's just the thing, I want the language to be able to read the whole book and understand it. Peter's 'From Bash to Z Shell' was good except that it discussed Bash as much as Zsh so it confused and diluted as much as it clarified and explained.
Indeed, search engine text indexing is lousy at short strings and punctuation.

And that's the unavoidable dilemma.  Zsh uses one or two characters as syntactic entities and those same characters might have three or four meanings in different contexts so the whole paradigm of the google search is just useless.  Nope, hafta read the book.  But manuals are not even designed to be helpful they are repositories of information that you consult when you know what you are looking for.  The right book will have a glossary in it, helpful hints, anatomy lessons, and a 'phrase book' -- even if you can't speak German, you can learn to order a beer.  Build up from simple examples.   Mean time, my only salvation is asking you guys for help -- which I always get :-)









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