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Comment by caslon | Hacker News Reader

That's a terrible idea. A shell scripting language doesn't need to do everything in the world. It just needs to tape together tools that can do everything.

POSIX sh can pass arrays around just fine, and that's all it needs to do. Feature creep is the worst possible thing you could do to a shell scripting language.

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No it can't. You have the argument array which is a horrible workaround. If you need to write scripts that interact with other tools a lot, bash is the language of choice. Starting and handling other processes is a messy thing in any other language.

It's not a terrible workaround; it's a beautiful demonstration of how flexible the standard shell is.

It's a bit of an inefficient hack compared to a language feature.

But POSIX sh doesn't have array support?

99% of my use case for Bash over POSIX sh is arrays, associative arrays, BASH_SOURCE, and PIPELINE (or whatever that array is that has positional pipe return status)

Which POSIX sh do you have in mind and how does one pass arrays around in it?

POSIX sh. Pass it as a string, use standard programs to turn it into what you want. Voila. Not that hard. Just like you do everything else in UNIX.

If you mean a standard, it will be too abstract to be considered as something that can run anything. Sometimes it has to be too vague in order to not make existing Bourne-style shells non-compliant. This isn't, for example, a standard for the C programming language where you can throw some things into the UB bag or the ID bag. POSIX sh is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual standard.

Even if it were an implementation, how would you write a "POSIX sh" equivalent of these lines taken from a bash script? (My point isn't that it's impossible.)

mkdir -p /tmp/nodes/{a,b,c,d,e} ; NODES=( /tmp/nodes/{a,b,c,d,e} ) ; echo ${NODES[$((`date +%-j` % ${#NODES[@]}))]}

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