[oandrew]

One feature I really wish for in shells is something similar to Perl's unquoted strings / single line concise HEREDOC syntax / raw literal syntax. e.g.

  $ echo q(no ' escaping ` required " here)
  no ' escaping ` required " here

This would make typing sql / json much easier. To my knowledge none of the shells implement this. Does anyone know why?

[chasil]

The POSIX shell was set in stone in the early '90s. The standards board actually removed features from the Korn shell in order for Xenix-286 or comparable systems to be able to run it in a 64k text segment, with clean and maintainable C (ksh88 is very ugly C).

The standards for the POSIX shell are controlled by the Austin group/OSF, and they are not receptive to changes, unfortunately.