Dear Linux distributions: if I want to use a freaky super-intelligenteditor I am perfectly able to fire up emacs myself, or even type ' vim 'instead of ' vi ' (honest, the extra letter is not too much for me totype). I want vi . You know, the simple and predictable thing thatsystem administrators like because it behaves.

As an aid to your planning, here is a minimum feature for any editorcalled vi :

When I paste things into an alleged vi in insert

The Bourne shell's real problem for writing shell scripts is that itdoesn't have a real data structure for lists. This leads to puttinglists in strings, which leads to reparsing strings, which leads tohideous doom and all of those problems with filenames that havewhitespace in them.

(When lists are represented as strings, every string might be a list,so every time the Bourne shell expands a variable it must try to turnit into a list unless the expansion is specifically marked as not doingthat