Re: [bug-gawk] fatal: split: second argument is not an array

[Hermann Peifer]

On 2013-03-22 12:36, Hermann Peifer wrote:
> On 2013-03-22 5:21, Aharon Robbins wrote:
> > I'm afraid you're misunderstanding. Any reference to a previously
> > non-existent element creates it *as a scalar* with an untyped value
> > (which
> > acts as the null string or zero). (...)
> > This is how awk has worked since The Beginning....
>
> Hi Arnold,
>
> Thanks for the explanations.
>
> My thinking was...

I am coming back to an older mail about arrays of arrays. At the time, 
the issue was that I naively thought split("", a[1]) would force a[1] to 
be an array, similar to split("", b), which does exactly this for b. 
This is obviously not the case, as "Any reference to a previously 
non-existent element creates it *as a scalar*".

However: delete b[1] forces b[1] to be an array and maybe this could be 
mentioned at the end of doc section 8.6, as an alternative of forcing 
b[1] to be an array by creating an arbitrary index.

Maybe delete b[1] is even the better alternative as it creates an array 
with 0 elements and no arbitrary index can cause hiccups further down 
the road.

Hermann