Re: why is eval needed?

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com>]

On Sun, Nov 20, 2022 at 12:17 PM Stephane Chazelas
<stephane@chazelas.org> wrote:
>
> No, you have it completely backwards. And I think at the heart
> of your misunderstanding there is the misconception that you
> pass a "command string" to an executable.

This misconception may be an effect of Ray's background with
DOS/Windows command interpreters.

In that world, each command is responsible both for parsing its
"arguments" and for interpreting them.  There was (is, I suppose) a
standard DLL to support the parsing part, and a lot of commands used
it, but it was still down to the command itself to call that DLL.

In the Unix-based world, it's expected that the shell will do the
parsing and the command only has to do the interpreting, so there are
a lot more rules about the structure of the command line.