Re: More about empty-string named references

[Mikael Magnusson <mikachu@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2025 at 7:18 AM Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > it's already the case that "typeset -a arr=" is not accepted. And rightly so!
> > An empty string is obviously neither an empty array, nor an array that
> > contains just the empty string.
>
> This is true but an array ...
>  - can be discarded and replaced with any scalar by simple assignment.
>  - can be discarded and replaced by any other type by a new typeset
>  - cannot be converted from/to a scalar by typeset -a/+a
>
> None of those hold for a nameref.

I was going to ask why this is fine:
foo=( arr values ); foo=hello
but this is not:
foo=( arr values ); nameref bar=foo; bar=hello
however, I was greeted with this error instead, which I assume is not expected:
zsh -c 'nameref foo=bar; bar=(hi); foo=hello'
1: params.c:1067: BUG: local parameter is not unset

(and once I tried it in a function scope, both actually work fine, i
remembered namerefs
not allowing to change type from array to scalar before, maybe it was
changed recently?)

> > It is detrimental because it implies that a statement like "typeset -nu ref=$1"
> > will not necessarily initialize the reference. Innumerable users will have to
> > figure out why their script exhibits a completely weird behavior
(In my estimation, these users will be quite numerable, or at least
not more innumerable than before).

-- 
Mikael Magnusson