Re: heirarchical lists, one more time.

[friedman@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Noah Friedman)]

>the change you propose would be very inconvenient for people who
>are interoperating es with rc.  for example, i use es as my interactive
>shell, but lots of my scripts are still written in rc.  if things like
>$path got confused, that would be bad.

Why not also fix the same bug in rc?

If the answer is that such a change would break interopability with older
versions of rc, I hope you and Byron will take into consideration that one
of the reasons modern unix is so bad is that it has N different kinds of
backward compatibility for earlier, buggy systems.  None of the baggage
ever goes away.  Remember the hazeltine `~' hack in the tty driver?  If
unix still exists in the year 2100, it may not be terribly recognizable,
but I'd wager money the hazeltine hack will still be there. 

You could decide never to improve any program once it's written, I guess,
but I think that would also be an unfortunate choice.