{}

[rob at alice.UUCP]

Bourne put in { and } in a half-hearted answer to those (reasonably)
complaining about sh syntax.  However, he did it badly.  In particular,
they are treated in the grammar as words.  Fixing the grammar so they
are recognized in the same place as ( and ) makes them a lot more useful.
I did that in the V8 shell, along with a bunch of other things.  However,
for an interactive shell you still need better brackets than {} because
there are parsing difficulties (else is the best example) that need one-token
lookahead if you use { and } to group everything.

-Rob Pike