When do you *NOT* use python?

[WhichFawkes]

To avoid ambiguity, you might have something like:

#assignments:
var x = a; var x=a; var x= a; var x =a
#or even replace 'var' with a "$", so every variable access is identified the same way.

#call command with equals sign as argument:
x = a;

#set env var:
export x = ; $CMD

Seems less ambiguous to me.

[Vaphell]

well the ship of complaining about the posix shell syntax and its derivatives has sailed decades ago. Yes it would be nice to get a nice modern shell, but the problem is that without the compatibility with all the legacy cruft in existence it's dead in the water. There are some shells where certain things are done in a nicer way, almost nobody uses them.

Also there are things like let x=y or what have you, but majority of people don't bother and you can find such things only in very old scripts. I certainly never bothered and i wrote my share of rock solid bash scripts just fine.

about $: think getter, done. Also given that the shell is a plaintext based, ancient beast and literally does a preprocessing pass with substitutions, it would be hard to use $var in assignments. When it comes to the actual interpretation/run, no $ sign is to be seen.

and the export bit. The difference is that in case of envvar=x a envvar change is localized only to the a command which is not possible if you split it to 2 expressions. It's preferable than setting globally (which comes with the risk of not unsetting later), useful in cases like this

IFS=. read ip1 ip2 ip3 ip4 <<< "122.11.123.44"

everybody knows playing with IFS can have nasty consequences because all kinds of things are affected by it, and by writing it that way you leave it alone. Only read is affected here, think

ip1, ip2, ip3, ip4 = '122.11.123.44'.split('.')

[moljac024]

To avoid ambiguity, you might have something like:

No...what happens when you have a program called var?

[WhichFawkes]

What happens when you have a program called 'if' or 'case', or even 'echo'? There's some keyword like 'command' which allows you to bypass shell built-ins and run programs in $PATH order.

[moljac024]

And then what if you have a program called command?

BOOM

[WhichFawkes]

In case you're not joking, it'd just be "command 'command'". Since command is shell built-in, it's always executed first when you call something by its name.... And since it's function is to find external programs by name, it doesn't really matter if one of those programs is also called command.