In a weird way it kinda reminds me of `exec` in sh (which replaces the current process instead of creating a child process). Practically, there's little difference between these two scripts:

    #!/bin/sh
    foo
    bar

vs

    #!/bin/sh
    foo
    exec bar

And you could perhaps imagine a shell that does "tail process elimination" to automatically perform the latter when you write the former.

But the distinction can be important due to a variety of side effects and if you could only achieve it through carefully following a pattern that the shell might or might not recognize, that would be very limiting.