(This is really in response to Peter Dalgaard, not to myself)
> This seems to come from constructions of the form
>
> for i in $FOO : do .... ; done
>
> If $FOO is empty, then the resulting "for i in ;" is a syntax error
> with some versions of bash and sh.
Given that one should generally be writing scripts for the Bourne shell, it is IMHO the case that "for i in ;" is a syntax error, period.
> Current Linux versions of bash do not have that behaviour.
...violating Bourne shell compatibility in yet another way...
> One workaround could be to upgrade bash.
If R is to be an application that is not specific to (recent distributions of) Linux, one should expect and code for systems that may not have bash at all but only the Bourne shell.
> Another workaround could be to safeguard the for-loop with
>
> test "$FOO" != "" && for i in $FOO : do .... ; done
>
> in all of the Makefiles where this can be an issue.
That is one of the possible ways in which R developers could, I suppose, address the issue.
-- Atro Tossavainen (Mr.) / The Institute of Biotechnology at Systems Analyst, Techno-Amish & / the University of Helsinki, Finland, +358-9-19158939 UNIX Dinosaur / employs me, but my opinions are my own. < URL : http : / / www . helsinki . fi / %7E atossava / > NO FILE ATTACHMENTS ______________________________________________ R-devel_at_r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-develReceived on Wed 29 Apr 2009 - 09:00:45 GMT
Archive maintained by Robert King, hosted by
the discipline of
statistics at the
University of Newcastle,
Australia.
Archive generated by hypermail 2.2.0, at Wed 29 Apr 2009 - 14:32:38 GMT.
Mailing list information is available at https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel. Please read the posting guide before posting to the list.