[Arm-netbook] Side-Topic: Liberating PocketCHIP

[Philip Hands]

John Luke Gibson <eaterjolly at gmail.com> writes:

> On 5/9/17, Benson Mitchell <benson.mitchell+arm-netbook at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Seems like you're confusing back-quote (`) with single-quote ('), maybe?
>>
> I just want to say that alone makes for pretty terrible design within
> a fundamental language which an entire os can't run without.

When `` was first used I'm sure they were very pleased to have come up
with command substitution at all, so blaming them for introducing
readability issues is a bit harsh.  It's also possible that the
distinction between ` and ' was much more obvious when one was reading
the code off of a punched paper tape ;-)

$() has been in POSIX for at least 13 years:

  http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_06_03

but I suspect that it was in 1003.2 in 1997, but cannot find a
reference.

It is certainly a shame when one sees new scripts being written with ``,
but that's what one gets when people are learning by example, and there
is too little curation of the examples to weed out the archaic usage.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/    http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
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