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

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 16,  2:40pm, Greg Klanderman wrote:
}
} If the NO_SH_WORD_SPLIT default is only to be the source of subtle
} bugs and not actually useful, then it should be removed.

I'd suggest that if the shell has been behaving this way for more than
15 years now, and a majority of its users consider the behavior to be
useful, that perhaps asserting that it is "only" a source of subtle
bugs is a tad presumptive.

} I don't see any reason you'd
} ever want the current behavior in a new script, and any existing
} script should just emulate to the broken behavior.

That's exactly backwards from the philosophy that zsh development has
always followed.