This is not net.lang.algol!

[Doug Gwyn <gwyn>]

> Any body have a source license so that they can dig into the code of the Bourne
> shell?  No offense to Bourne (his shell is one of my most-used programming
> environments), but the code is a mess of defs like DO .. OD, LOOP .. POOL, etc.
> I fail to see the advantage unless one is incapable of learning a new language
> and is forced to under-utilize C by thinking of it as something else.

I agree with the general comments (about not redefining the language to
look like something else), but feel that Bourne is perhaps being maligned.
I did a fair amount of maintenance work on the Algol-68 Bourne shell source
and found that it was easy to work with once one got used to it (aye,
there's the rub).  Bourne's constructs avoided the need to worry about
curly braces, which made code modification less error-prone.

Fortunately, somebody (probably Dave Korn) turned the Bourne shell back
into C for UNIX System V Release 2.0.  I haven't looked at "adb" recently
to see if the same is true there..