Re: word breaks and control-a

[friedman@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Noah Friedman)]

>Rich pointed out an alternative interpretation of the bugs section note
>i just sent out.  i meant:
>
>        Woe betide the environment string set by some other program to
>        contain either the character control-a or the sequence control-b
>        followed by control-a or control-b.

That's not much better, because there is still an arbitrary limitation.
Consider, for example, the perfectly reasonable array

   ascii = \001 \002 \003 \004 ...

This won't be preserved properly across shell invocations given either the
current behavior or the proposed solution.

I guess you can't help it if some arbitary program clutters your
environment with environment strings that are meaningless or illegal in the
shell (for example, rc doesn't understand es' function definitions).  But
for es not to work robustly with es, or rc with rc, is particularly
egregious.