It does not sacrifice sub-shell syntax: it is fully supported, I just had to rename it from ( ... ) to [ ... ] to avoid conflicts with ( ... ) that switches to lisp syntax

Also, both $(...) and `...` shell interpolation are fully supported.

The only thing I intentionally sacrificed is shell flow control: schemesh shell syntax does not have the builtins 'case' 'for' 'if' 'while' etc.

In practically all examples I tried, escaping to Scheme for loops and conditional code works better: it avoids the usual pitfalls related to shell string splitting, and usually results in more readable code too, at least for a Lisper

Note: there's also some additional parsing logic to distinguish between sub-shell syntax [ ... ] and wildcard patterns that use [ ... ] as well