[chx]

> or something uncommon like zsh

By the time our lord and savior zsh appeared on the scene Perl was already at Perl 3. And, to be fair, I do not think many used zsh before 2.1 which was some time 1991 fall and by then the Camel Book was out for half a year or something like that. So the pre-Perl and the we-use-zsh days do not really overlap.

When Perl appeared the absolute hotness was the version of Korn shell what later became known as ksh88. https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/tree/master/local/tool...