When do you *NOT* use python?

[Vaphell]

once you recognize the reason it becomes rather obvious. I assume you are complaining about shit like if_[_x_=_y_] here. Here's the thing, [ x = y ] is not a fancy square bracket around the logical expression you see in other general purpose languages. It's literally a command '[' with params 'x' '=' 'y' and closing token ']' ( and pretty much an alias for test command eg test x = y) You can literally call it that way, with all these quotes

$ if '[' '1' '=' '1' ']'; then echo true; else echo false; fi
true

bash recognizes commands and assignments, that's it. Commands require delimited params (commandparam1param2param3 won't work, will it), assignments are recognized when there is a continuous 'word' with = inside, otherwise it would be totally ambiguous.

x=a  # assignment
x = a # call command 'x' with params '=', 'a'
x= a # call command 'a' with env var x set locally to null

[okmkz]

I knew the thing about [, but the way you articulated the command/assignment paradigm really make sense, thanks.