On 2024-04-13 13:53, Bart Schaefer wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 13, 2024 at 8:14 AM Ray Andrews<rayandrews@eastlink.ca>  wrote:
> In the beginning, there were only environment strings ($SHELL, $PATH,
> etc.) and positional parameters ($1, $2, etc.).  When a command was
> run, it got its arguments as an "array" of positional parameters.
> This is how "variables" came to be called "parameters" in shell
> jargon.  This mapped directly onto C main() argc ($#) and argv[] ($@)
> with the phantom $0 as the name of the command.
>
Some might say it's esoteric trivia but I disagree.  When you elucidate 
the history, and the mapping onto C, things make more sense.  The shells 
had to grow organically, didn't they?