These features were added slowly, randomly, as time passed. The weird syntaxes for all of these are a clear sign of this.
Practically all shell interpreters suffer from decades of feature creep since the original bourne shell. They're full of weird arcana, hard to maintain and debug.
Many people tried to replace bash and died on the hill because of these weird features, or ended up creating a replacement that is even slower, or ended up rediscovering what perl is.
Practically all shell interpreters suffer from decades of feature creep since the original bourne shell. They're full of weird arcana, hard to maintain and debug.
Many people tried to replace bash and died on the hill because of these weird features, or ended up creating a replacement that is even slower, or ended up rediscovering what perl is.