From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <6479a8cea391ece6904600705f8449c1@vitanuova.com>
Date: Fri,  9 Mar 2007 18:23:39 +0000
From: rog@vitanuova.com
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] How can I shift a variable other than ?
In-Reply-To: <5ad6cc905af785ea7998576ecc08b401@orthanc.cc.titech.ac.jp>
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in the inferno shell, i added multi-variable assignment,
which seems to address the issue that shift is most often used for.

for instance:

% a = (a b c d)
% (x y a) = $a
% echo $x
a
% echo $y
b
% echo $a
c d
% 

to throw away a few dummy values from the start of the
list, just use throwaway variable names.

i doubt this would be too much trouble to implement in rc.
(but who wants backwardly incompatible shell scripts?!)