You're the one who seems concerned about aesthetics, since I never brought it up. The idea of a quote construct exists in every language, $sp would be the equivalent; it has nothing to do with aesthetics. For example, Tcl has a similar grammar to mIRC when it comes to function arguments in that spaces delimit arguments. To preserve spaces, Tcl has a "string" construct using quotes. I'm not sure if you bothered to read what I wrote originally (apparently you haven't), but since quotes can already be used by scripts, there is a backwards compatibility issue at hand. The solution that avoids backward compatibility issues would be to use an identifier instead of "" syntax. Again, it's not about aesthetics, it's about selectively preserving spaces at tokenization. It would not "force" you to tokenize yourself, since the whole point is to *avoid* tokenizing. Example: for /mycommand a $sp(b c) d, the resulting $1- would be: $1=a, $2=b c, $3=d
I'm not sure what your example was trying to prove, but I don't see the relevance. $echo does not exist, and a construct like $sp would still be necessary for /commands of which there are thousands. If your idea is to abolish /commands, that's definitely not going to happen.
