Re: [PATCH] Supplant the "while case ... break ;; esac" idiom

David Kastrup [off-list ref] writes:

A lot of shell scripts contained stuff starting with

	while case "$#" in 0) break ;; esac

and similar.  I consider breaking out of the condition instead of the
body od the loop ugly, and the implied "true" value of the
non-matching case is not really obvious to humans at first glance.  It
happens not to be obvious to some BSD shells, either, but that's
because they are not POSIX-compliant.  In most cases, this has been
replaced by a straight condition using "test".  "case" has the
advantage of being faster than "test" on vintage shells where "test"
is not a builtin.  Since none of them is likely to run the git
scripts, anyway, the added readability should be worth the change.

A few loops have had their termination condition expressed
differently.

Signed-off-by: David Kastrup <redacted>
---

Ok, this is not really what we have been talking about except in one
case, but I think it is actually more of an improvement.

Gaah, didn't I say I do NOT think it is an improvement?

I consider breaking out of the condition instead of the
body od the loop ugly,

Well, as we all know that we disagree on this point, stating
what you consider one-sidedly here is quite inappropriate.

and the implied "true" value of the
non-matching case is not really obvious to humans at first
glance.

It is more like "if you do not know shell".

In other words, I am somewhat disgusted with the first part of
your proposed commit log message, although I like what the patch
does ;-).

-while case "$#" in 0) break ;; esac
+while test "$#" != 0
 do
     case "$1" in
     -a)

And let's not quote "$#".