Comment by rcxdude

Shells should treat data as data, and not have the default behaviour be treating it as code (i.e. you should need to do 'eval $x' or some equivilant if you acutally want the string to be treated as a shell command). This would also mean having a real list type, instead of depending on arbitrary seperators in strings. This is exactly how other languages treat it, and it is not a significant challenge for interactive use (in fact, it would substantially reduce the opportunity for suprises when running commands interactively as well).