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Stephen Bourne was a great fan of ALGOL, and had C preprocessor directives to "ALGOLify" C.

https://research.swtch.com/shmacro

The Bourne shell thus adopted ALGOL syntax, distinct from anything else in UNIX.

David Korn brought a pile of C, and wedged it into a max 64k program space (for Xenix), and his upward-compatible Korn shell (ksh88) had many, many features.

Then there were the "UNIX Wars"...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars

The fallout of this was the choice of a few Korn features, but not all (no arrays, coprocesses, [some] eval, regex, et al.)

The wars defined the POSIX shell. Yes, it can be infuriating.



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