> The author literally tried to use the string “107” Well, no. That string was not literally used there at all: if it was, there would have been a literal 107

> The author literally tried to use the string “107” Well, no. That string was not literally used there at all: if it was, there would have been a literal 107 in the user's input. There wasn't. > It’s impossible to be a good software engineer in 2023 without understanding the basics of shell programming > bash is just constructing strings of text and doing stuff with it It's a reassuring knowledge in 2023, after 40 years of countless bugs, exploits, vulnerabilities and accidentally rm-ed important files, the paradigm of "just constructing strings of text and (blindly) doing stuff with it" is still ubiquitously used and one can not be a good software engineer without extensive knowledge of it. Bash truly deserves description of "a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums" much more than APL.