Hello,

I recently updated my org-mode from version 7 (I think) to the latest. 
The behaviour of using a table as a variable in a shell code source 
block has changed. I use to use it like this:

#+BEGIN_SRC sh :results output :var table=synteny-names :separator ,
   IFS=','
   while read col1 col2; do
       # do stuff
   done <<EOF
   $table
   EOF
#+END_SRC

This just stopped working with the new version and I could not figure 
out why for a long time. But I looked in the new ob-shell.el code and 
figured out that when the shell is bash it now makes an associative 
array if the variable is a table. I couldn't seem to find this 
documented anywhere.

This new behaviour seems like it would be useful in a lot of cases, but 
in my case, the tables are not key-value pairs, they are merely things I 
want to iterate over. I wonder if simply checking to see if :separator 
is set and using the old behaviour if so would be better? This would 
seem to be a fine fix which maintains backwards compatibility unless 
there is a reason to set :separator but still expect the new behaviour.

Thanks,

George.