> Is there a strong reason why all shells have this crazy syntax? Stephen Bourne was a fan of Algol. The source to the shell is… interesting. Via a bunch of p

> Is there a strong reason why all shells have this crazy syntax? Stephen Bourne was a fan of Algol. The source to the shell is… interesting. Via a bunch of preprocessor macros, the (C) code looks like: IF !letter(*cp) THEN return(FALSE); ELSE WHILE *++cp DO IF !alphanum(*cp) THEN return(FALSE); FI OD FI return(TRUE);