Re: treatment of empty strings - why is this not a bug?

[Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>]

Greg Klanderman wrote:
> You and Peter seem to be in charge here - do you both still agree that
> dropping empty strings is a desirable default?
> 
> Would you guys be OK with adding an option to inhibit this?

I think that's more likely to be a source of confusion rather than a
help.  If you know about the problem you can already get round it.  If
you don't the option isn't going to help.  The option's yet another
headache for debugging.

Further, I don't think the option would be useful without syntax to
restore the current behaviour for each variable (the opposite of
double-quoting), since as Bart pointed out that's quite widely used.
That adds yet another of layer of complexity and source of bugs.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws@xxxxxxx>                  Software Engineer
CSR PLC, Churchill House, Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Road
Cambridge, CB4 0WZ, UK                          Tel: +44 (0)1223 692070