The rc shell and its excellent handling of whitespace

This blog post is a response to Mark Dominus' “The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace". I’ve been working on a shell for Unix-like systems called rc, which draws heavily from the Plan 9 shell of the same name. When I saw Mark’s post about the perils of whitespace in POSIX shells (or derived shells, like bash), I thought it prudent to see if any of the problems he outlines are present in the shell I’m working on myself. Good news: they aren’t! Let’s go over each of his examples. First he...

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