"Portable" (no debug magic) mode using HERE-documents (<<'EOF')

[Artoria2e5]

A lot of people are requesting ticktick for some other shell xsh where debug facilities may be nonexistent. A way to get that job done is to write a function that reads from its stdin, transpiles the code, and runs eval -- no caller magic needed! It's going to work in interactive shells too!

# The function should look like this...
tt() {
  eval "$(__tick_fun_tokenize_expression | __tick_fun_parse_expression)"
}
# don't ask me about disabling the rest of the magic i don't know okay?

People can then write blocks of JSON for that in here-documents and one-line here-strings. They are a bit more tedious, but that is expected. For example, instead of the example, we can say:

#!/bin/bash
TICKTICK_NOMAGIC=1
. ticktick.sh

bob=Bob
tt <<'EOF'
  people = {
    "HR" : [
      "Alice",
      $bob,
      "Carol"
    ],
    "Sales": {
      "Gale": { "profits" : 1000 },
      "Harry": { "profits" : 500 }
    }
  }
EOF

function printEmployees() {
  echo
  echo "  The $(tt <<< 'people.Engineering.length()') Employees listed are:"

  for employee in $(tt <<< 'people.Engineering.items()'); do
    printf "    - %s\n" ${!employee}
  done

  echo 
}

echo Base Assignment
tt <<< 'people.Engineering = [ "Darren", "Edith", "Frank" ]'
printEmployees

newPerson=Isaac
echo Pushed a new element by variable, $newPerson onto the array
tt <<< 'people.Engineering.push($newPerson)'
printEmployees

echo Shifted the first element off: $(tt <<< 'people.Engineering.shift()')
printEmployees

echo Popped the last value off: $(tt <<< 'people.Engineering.pop()')
printEmployees

echo Indexing an array, doing variable assignments

person0=$(tt <<< 'people.HR[0]')
echo $person0 $(tt <<< 'people.HR[1]')

(Note the quotes on EOF -- that prevents the shell from expanding $bob on its own prematurely. And the quotes on (), because when they poke out they make a syntax error. The quotes on [0] is there because it can mean a glob, and you don't want to risk having a file called people.HR0 and messing this up.)

---

• If you are going interactive, you can even type tt, paste stuff in, and Ctrl-D it. The possibilties are limitless!
• People can put positional arguments in by calling tt as tt "$@", although I don't see much use for that. If they really want that, they can make an alias tta='tt "$@"' and make it work in scripts with shopt -s expand_aliases. (Aliases are wonderful; they are like macros for bash, lmao.)
• We can write another function ttl() { printf %s "$1" | tt "${@:2}"; }, just for typing less <<<.