Groovy: What's wrong with this "Hello World" program?

Question

This does not work:

$ groovy -e 'println "Hello, world!"'
org.codehaus.groovy.control.MultipleCompilationErrorsException: startup failed:
script_from_command_line: 1: unexpected char: 0xFFFF @ line 1, column 23.
   println "Hello, world!
                         ^

1 error

However, putting a space between the last double- and single-quote works...

$ # groovy -e 'println "Hello, world!"'
$   groovy -e 'println "Hello, world!" '
Hello, world!

... even though bash seems to be able to correctly handle the trailing "' pair (i.e., without any intervening space) as follows:

$ echo '"Hello, world!"'
"Hello, world!"

Also, parenthesizing the println argument works just fine:

$ groovy -e 'println ("Hello, world!")'
Hello, world!

Now, I would like to know why the very first case does not work.

I'm using:

• bash, version "4.2.45(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)"
• groovy, version 2.1.3

Answer 1

As BDKosher already stated, this is a bug from Apache Commons CLI. Groovy wants to update to 1.3, but the CLI folks take their time with that version and it contains incompatibilities.

And as I wrote in an above comment already 0xFFFF is used by antlr to show the end of the file, it does not have to be a valid unicode character for that. The wording was criticized because of this, but the wording is from the parser generator antlr, not from us.