On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 05:44:00PM +0100, joerg@britannica.bec.de wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 25, 2006 at 04:58:55PM +0100, Roland Illig wrote:
> > I was pretty sure, and someone else has complained, too. Well, the 
> > quotes are not needed, but without them, the '|' characters obviously 
> > have to be escaped properly so the shell does not interpret them as pipe 
> > operators.
> 
> I'm normally using "," as separator, maybe we can adopt a common style
> over pkgsrc? It would make a possible sed-quotation target in bmake
> simpler as well.

I used the '|' delimiter for most things because it's visually fairly
similar to a '/' for those of us old enough to have used ed for most
things, it extends from the bottom to the top of the "cell", and is
visually quite obvious as a delimiter.

Before the quotation police came upon us, I was quite happy using it.

However, in this brave new world (just to mix literary allusions for a
while) in which we live, I can recognise that there are limitations to
using '|' as a delimiter, and so we should use something else.  ','
would seem to be the most obvious choice for its lack of globbing
meta-character-ness (although personally I detest its use, since it
blurs into the substiution patterns visually and I have real trouble
parsing the substitution strings).

Which brings me back to my original question about all of this. Why
the quoting fetish? It seems to have been sprung upon us, and I have
no clear idea where it's going, what its goals are, and what's going
to happen when we get there.

Regards,
Alistair