Re: shouldn't prompt printing be smarter?

[Francesco Montorsi]

Paul Jarc ha scritto:
> Francesco Montorsi <f18m_cpp217828@yahoo.it> wrote:
> > why would you ever want to have the prompt printed at non-zero column of 
> > the terminal?
>
> One possible reason: so you can know whether the previous command
> ended its output with a newline.  Otherwise the output becomes
> slightly ambiguous.
Why should the users be interested to understand if the program ended 
with a newline or no?

Also, creating an "option" to decide which behaviour should be followed 
(current one or the one I propose) would make everyone happy: we could 
have a PROMPT_COLUMN env var which tells bash where to print the prompt. 
E.g. PROMPT_COLUMN==-1 means current behaviour, PROMPT_COLUMN==0 means 
my proposed behaviour.

Francesco