[GRASS-dev] Re: thematic mapping scripts

[Glynn Clements]

Michael Barton wrote:

> Porting the existing script is not terribly hard (though it would be
> time consuming)

Actually, porting non-trivial bash scripts can be quite difficult.

The main problem is that the only data type is a string. So when some
calculation is performed with e.g. 'echo $var | sed ...', figuring out
what the command is supposed to be doing depends upon knowing what
$var is supposed to contain at that point. Writing such code is much
easier than reading it.

It gets even worse when variables contain the names of other variables
or other shell syntax, for use with eval; both r.in.wms and r.tileset
do a lot of this.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>