From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Tue, 05 May 2020 21:07:41 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] CodingGuidelines: drop arithmetic expansion advice to use "$x"
Message-ID: <20200505210741.GB645290@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqr1vy9kv0.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>

On Tue, May 05, 2020 at 01:40:03PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> A new entry in the "What's cooking" report has this:
> 
>     * jk/arith-expansion-coding-guidelines (2020-05-04) 1 commit
>      - CodingGuidelines: drop arithmetic expansion advice to use "$x"
> 
>      The coding guideline for shell scripts instructed to refer to a
>      variable with dollar-sign inside airthmetic expansion to work
>      around a bug in old versions of bash, which is a thing of the past.
>      Now we are not forbidden from writing $((var+1)).

s/bash/dash/, I think

> Writing the last sentence made me wonder if we should go one step
> further and actually encourage actively omitting the dollar-sign
> from variable reference instead.

I don't have a strong preference either way. I gave a few reasons to
prefer the dollar-less version in:

  https://lore.kernel.org/git/20200504151351.GC11373@coredump.intra.peff.net/

but I couldn't find a case where the difference really matters in
practice for otherwise-correct code. If we don't care much either way,
I'd just as soon not have a rule. We have enough rules as it is, and I
don't think either is obvious enough that somebody who is used to one
style will get confused by the other.

-Peff