7 ms·

unless i miss something this should not be an issue. the lexer could parse if as an IF token, and the parser could treat tags as STRING || IF ( || other keyword

• duskwuff 2y ago
  That seems like it'd get really awkward pretty quickly. "if" isn't unique in this regard; there are about a hundred shell builtins, and all of them can be used as an argument to a command. (For example, "echo then complete command while true history" is a valid shell command consisting entirely of names of builtins, and the only keyword in it is the leading "echo".)
• deathanatos 2y ago
  You'd have to `|| EVERY_KEYWORD_IN_LANG`, and then if you ever add a keyword, now you're updating that list there, and anywhere else you've used it. As the "Lexer hack" Wiki page says, this is only a problem if you're lexing in the first place. If you just parse the grammar, this isn't a problem.
• hnlmorg 2y ago
  The problem lies with shells extensive usage of barewords. If you could eliminate the requirement for any bareword to be treated as a string then parsing shell code would then become much simpler...but also few people would want to use it because nobody wants to write the following in their interactive shell: git "commit" "-am" "message" ls "-l" etc