Re: Bug with associative array and P flag?

[Oliver Kiddle <okiddle@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jonathan Hankins wrote:

> Below are two examples of using the P flag to variable expansion to access an 
> array indirectly.  When using a regular array (foo), this works correctly.  
> However, when using an associative array in the same way, I get the value of 
> the first (alphabetically? randomly?) key (animal) regardless of the key I 
> use.  Should the P flag work with the associative array in the same way as it 
> does with the regular array?

This isn't so much a bug as a design limitation. It has nothing in
particular to do with the P flag. Note that:
  print ${${bar}[color]}
would print `cat' just like ${${(P)ref}[color]}

Note also:
  % print $bar
  cat apple red

What is happening is that the inner expansion is returning this as an
array of three items. Using [color] as an index is then equivalent to
using [0] because it is taken as a regular array index and hence a math
expression. Note the difference if you assign color=2 first. Ideally,
we would need an explicit (v) for it to work this way.

For this to work, I think we will need the long overdue major changes
to the parameter code. That's because I don't think the nested
expansion code handles anything other than scalars and arrays for the
nested parameters.

Oliver