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Maybe we are at cross purposes. My default shell is bash, but my default "sh" is dash. This is as it should be (and is default in Debian & Ubuntu I think).

If you are talking about interactive use, of course bash is the one to use, but for writing shell scripts, it is a 10X interactivity overhead" over dash.

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IMO it's a big win for scripts to at least be able to use Arrays in that otherwise "stringly-typed" world.

As a POSIX shell masochist myself, Arrays are the single biggest missing feature. POSIX shells actually do have one array: $@. Having more would make my life so much easier.

The amount of gyrations I go through to account for the lack of arrays is easily 1000x worse than accounting for not having local variables.

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