Globbing

[hanche@ams.sunysb.edu (Harald Hanche-Olsen)]

At the risk of flogging an another dead horse...:

The globbing behaviour of es disturbs me:

; echo (w x)^*
wocky.tex x*

Is this for `cultural compatibility' or do people want it this way?  I
don't like it, because it leads to disturbing error messages when I
say rm *.^(aux dvi log toc idx ind) for example.  But since we will
probably never agree on what should happen, maybe I might suggest
adding a hook?  Yes, another feeping creature.  The hook might be
called with any unmatched wildcard containing names as arguments, and
whatever it returns will be substituted in its place.  Then the
current behaviour can be gotten by assigning $&result to this hook; I
might wish to assign {result ()} to it; and others might want the hook
to throw an error (even I might want that behaviour locally, in some
functions) or send mail to their Congress Creature.

Sorry to disturb the peace and quiet after yesterday's hectic flurries
of activity...  ;->

- Harald