The rc example is worse than the first of yours. I hate the zsh special syntax in the second: it violates a deeply ingrained code feel I have about the syntax

The rc example is worse than the first of yours. I hate the zsh special syntax in the second: it violates a deeply ingrained code feel I have about the syntax of shell code. The do ... done syntax helps the eye. rc really shines when you have problems that in bash or zsh would suggest using multiple layers of expansion. The semantics of rc's expansion is much less thorny. I prefer real examples - here, why not just write seq 1 100 - what is the loop for? And shell loops can frequently (always, if you are willing to write helper scripts) be replaced with xargs, which tends to be very much faster, e.g. seq 1 100 | xargs echo (which doesn't quite give the same output, but passing -n1 to xargs fixes that)