[hollerith]

>If you go look at Plan 9 rc shell scripts, you'll see how much cleaner they are.

I used rc as my interactive shell and for very light shell scripting for over 10 years, and I consider it only slight better than the other Unix shells. In fact, the fact that rc's rules for escaping (quoting) characters like hash and space are incompatible with Emacs's shell mode's file-name completion was enough to cancel out any benefit I have derived from the relative "cleanness" of rc.

the (minor) advantages of rc for me: not having to remember the more complex quoting rules of bash, etc. unlike with bash, etc, no part of an rc commandline is ever interpreted twice except for when the double-interpretation is caused by an explicit use of the "backquote" (eval and substitute) operator.

I know this is just my subjective opinion, but I find Unix shells, including rc, inferior to almost any other programming language.

I always got a little sad when I needed to write anything requiring an if statement or anything but the simplest loop in rc (or any other Unix shell). I have come to realize that I would much, much rather write such things in Emacs Lisp -- and have transitioned to doing so. (The start-up time of Emacs --batch is fast enough on modern hardware not to be an impediment.)