>The key to rc’s design success in this area is the introduction of a second primitive. The Bourne shell and its derivatives traditionally work with only one pr

>The key to rc’s design success in this area is the introduction of a second primitive. The Bourne shell and its derivatives traditionally work with only one primitive: strings. But command lines are made of lists of strings, and so a language which embodies the primitives of the command line ought to also be able to represent those as a first-class feature.