Unix quoting

Unix quoting is a great idea executed badly. The idea that you should be able to compose commands from the output of other commands is excellent. The problem is that you can't compose them arbitrarily.

Composition is completely hamstrung by a simple syntactic flaw: the begin- and end-delimiters for all the quoting forms are indistinguishable. So if I write:

`ls `pwd`/files`

the shell cannot determine whether the second occurrence of the backtick (`) character is ending the command or starting a sub-command.

This wouldn't be so terrible if there were a reasonable form for local binding so you could write your shell commands in A-normal form.