I agree completely. I've been thinking about this a lot, and non-quoted strings strike me as an absolute requirement for anything that aims to replace the bourn

I agree completely. I've been thinking about this a lot, and non-quoted strings strike me as an absolute requirement for anything that aims to replace the bourne shell and its descendants (as opposed to complementing them in the way that Perl/Python/Ruby do it). But obviously it's hard to have non quoted strings in a programming language. I need to play more with TCL (the one non sh-like language I know that does this) but I think even it has some very strange features that grow out of treating ordinary text as strings.