Hello,

I find it a big problem in terms of both aethetics and usability that there are two different rules for valid names (aka identifiers) in bash.

The rules for variable names are different that those for functions and I see no strong argument why that should be the case.

You can do stuff like the famous fork-bomb, because of it.

But you can also block you functionality that would otherwise be accessible.

Consider the following example:

$ -f() { echo hello world;}
$ -f
hello world
$ --force() { echo "hello world";}
$ --force
hello world

$ declare -f -f
[declare builtin prints ALL function definitions to console, not just that of "-f(). however, it included both functions "-f()" and "--force()" in it's output.]

I even saw some people writing code in bash and naming their functions something like "banana::printb() { ...;}".
Obviously this must be inspired from their previous programming languages, like Perl and it's module structure and how it's referenced during imports (use...).
But I find this highly misguided and potentially dangerous.

There are some weird cases that I cannot recall from memory, but it did happen to me that some code didn't work, because of the way I variable substition on function names and it was broken, if the function name contained a minus or a colon (possibly other chars would have the same effect).

You can even declare function which start with a digit, something that otherwise is not valid for variables.

$ 0f=1 # not a valid variable name / asignment
0f=1: command not found
$ 0f() { echo hello world;}
$ declare -f 0f
0f ()
{
    echo hello world
}

I don't know what the history is why this is even allowed and possibly there is or was some old standard to blame for this, there usually always is some kind of excuse for things that obvious.

However, at some point I believe it must be possible to leave the old, ugly stuff behind. No idea what your plans are about the manjor releases of Bash 6.0 or 7.0, but at some point in the future I believe this situation needs to be resolved - and yes, I am aware it WILL break (some) code.

Kindly asking for consideration / discussion / feedback.

Knock yourselves out.

Cheers,
Pax.