• ulterno@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    1 hour ago

    While C feels fine without having a keyword for function, I feel like bash would have benefitted from it.

  • Laser@feddit.org
    201·
    15 hours ago

    Not sure I’d call what bash has functions. They’re closer to subroutines in Basic than functions in other languages, as in you can’t return a value from them (they can only return their exit code, and you can capture their stdout and stderr). But even then, they are full subshells. It’s one of the reasons I don’t really like Bash, you’re forced into globally or at least broadly-scoped variables. Oh, and I have no clue right now how to find where in your pipe you got a non-null exit code.

    It’s not a big problem for simple scripting, but it makes things cumbersome once you try to do more.

    • Caveman@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 hours ago

      You’re not forced into global forced variables, but they’re the default. Use the local keyword in front of the variable declaration for nicely scoped variable.

      It’s not that cumbersome to do things like

      local date=`date`
echo "$date"

      but in all honesty the syntax sucks ass because it’s not intuitive. If statements suck ass, passing variables has to be done via command line arguments sucks ass, switch statements suck ass, making structured data sucks ass (jq is nice though).

      I agree with you that bash really sucks when you get to anything more than 10 lines and at that point I’d take literally prefer Dreamberd.

    • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 hours ago

      where in your pipe you got a non-null exit code

      First thing you want is set -e and set -o pipefail. That should report the errors in human-parseable form.

      Second, to capture exit codes from each command/program, you have to run each of them in sequence yourself, connected by pipes that you create via mkfifo — the same way as you would do it in any other programming environment. Bash’s | pipes are just a convenient shorthand for this,so if you want full control, you have to ditch the convenience.

    • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world
      3·
      9 hours ago

      Functions are definitely not subshells in Bash, seeing as anything modifying the environment, like pyenv and such, is implemented as functions instead of scripts — specifically because functions are run in the same shell instance.

      Unless ‘subshell’ means something in the vein of ‘like a new shell, but not really’.

      • Laser@feddit.org
        2·
        6 hours ago

        Functions are definitely not subshells in Bash

        You’re right, my bad, I got this mixed up with something else.

        • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 hours ago

          I’m gonna bet yes for the simple reason that various helper scripts exist that do advanced cd history, with fuzzy search and whatnot, and they can’t be implemented as anything other than functions.

    • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
      5·
      11 hours ago

      I really like bash when dealing with even somewhat advanced scripting. Like the 300 LOC scraper I have written over the past two days which horribly parses HTML files using grep | sed.

      It’s genuinely so much more fun to do this with Bash than, say, Python. I have once written a scraper using Beautifulsoup and I have no desire to do so ever again.

      Honestly, only Haskell manages to beat Bash in how satisfying it feels when you manage to get something working well.

      • Laser@feddit.org
        2·
        6 hours ago

        Bash has its upsides too, like the fact that it has arrays / lists and dictionaries / hashmaps. In my opinion, it gets iffy though when you need to do stuff with IFS; at that point one might be better off just using specialized tools.

        Not saying working bash isn’t good enough, but it can break in very surprising ways is my experience.

  • NotSteve_@piefed.caEnglish
    32·
    16 hours ago

    def (): is pretty nice

    Edit: also as someone doing a bunch of CI work right now, Bash can GTFO (unless the alternative is whatever Windows is doing)

  • Speiser0@feddit.org
    10·
    18 hours ago

    C++ has []{}.

    (You can also add more brackets if you wish to do nothing longer: []<>[[]]()[[]]{}())

    • spongebue@lemmy.world
      4·
      19 hours ago

      I have no idea why you’d need that especially since return y() is pretty easy, but… I want it!

      (Actually, I guess a super simple way of overloading a method, like fun x() = x(defaultValue) could be neat)

      • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
        6·
        18 hours ago

        This can also be a side product for code blocks being expressions instead of statements.

        In rust for example they are, so it’s not rare to see functions like:

        fn add_one(x: i32) -> i32 {
    x+1
}

        This lets you do amazing things like:

        let x = if y < 0.0 {
    0.0
} else {
    y
}

        which is the same as x = y < 0.0 ? 0.0 : y

        But is much better for more complex logic. So you can forget about chaining 3-4 ternary operations in a single line.

        • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 hours ago

          Lisp programmers seeing these ‘amazing things’:

          But yeah, every time I’m trying to do a ternary in Lua, I miss being able to just throw in an if. Thankfully it can be amended with Fennel.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        17 hours ago

        default values is one of my pet-peeves after using Python regularly. I wish more languages would let you just do something like def do_thing(arg=default_value) without hoops like builder pattern, function overloading, or whatnot

        • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world
          1·
          9 hours ago

          I mean, the go-to approach in Lisp, for example, is to have null as the default value (which doubles for false in there). And check for that in the function.

            • SlurpingPus@lemmy.world
              1·
              8 hours ago

              In Lisp, at least the Emacs Lisp with which I have experience, it’s customary to put in nil (Lisp’s null) for any omitted arguments in the middle that you can’t be arsed to specify — aside from just leaving off arguments at the end. In JS, typing in undefined in every such case would probably be an annoyance, so I’m guessing coders need to check for both undefined and null in these circumstances.

              Overall, it’s remarkable how Lisp teaches one to be much more relaxed about programming practices than is typical for mainstream languages. Design patterns? Data structures? Shit, just pass in a list or an assoc array, and maybe a function here and there. Also everything is an expression, enjoy your ternary (if) at any point anywhere.