... or perhaps, as the article suggests, that parsing was hard when we first started doing it decades ago and not everyone got it right.
If it wasn't abundantly clear, this is not an issue with any of the shells today.
If it wasn't abundantly clear, this is not an issue with any of the shells today.
If you omit those, a fairly intuitive unambiguous parse is very easy: if we’re [, check last argument is ] and throw it away; if one argument, return whether it’s empty; otherwise, if two, the first is a unary operator, evaluate and return that; otherwise, if three, the second is a binary operator, evaluate and return that; otherwise fail. That’s it.
The least-common-denominator aka /bin/sh and its syntax will stick around for decades to come. You can't rely on any of the "modern" shells to be around, particularly if you write scripts that target a multitude of unix-like systems (macOS, xBSD, Linux).
I really doubt it. If the comparison parameters are undistinguishable from the operators, it's only a matter of enough creativity and people will to find new ways to break it.