The Shape of Code

While reading a book on the Windows PowerShell some of the language design decisions struck me as distinctly odd, if not completely wrong. Thinking about them for a few days I started to appreciate the language designers point of view.

Computer shell languages satisfy a different need and exist within a different culture than ‘programming’ languages. I have been trying to put my finger on what it is about these two language categories that makes them different; the points I have come up with include:

• Little if any declaration of variables in shell languages (also true of scripting languages). Is this because ‘programs’ are expected to be short with few uses of any particular variable, or variables always having a single type, or always being scalar or perhaps the requirement to support an interactive approach to writing programs?
• Existing practice is for the < and > characters to be used to denote input/output redirection. Using these characters to denote both indirection and the binary less-then/greater-than operations would require some fancy disambiguation rules/analysis. PowerShell uses -lt, -le, -gt and -ge for the relational operators and other shells often use something similar; this usage visually jumps out at people use to thinking of the minus character as denoting the start of a command line option.
• Function calls have the syntax of a command line, i.e., any arguments appear in a whitespace separated list to the left of the function/command name (no use of round brackets or comma).
• Shell languages seem to contain many more special case behaviors than 'programming' languages. Perhaps this is because shell languages tend to evolve much more rapidly over time compared to programming languages (ok, Perl is an example of what is generally considered to be a programming language that has evolved a lot and it certainly has plenty of special corner cases).
• Shell languages often include support for checking the initialization status of a variable while most programming languages treat use of an uninitialized variable as having undefined behavior.
• Programming languages are designed to build and manipulate much more complex and larger data structures than are generally handled by shell languages.

While shell languages are invariable interpreted and compiling some of the functionality they support would be very difficult, I don't see this implementation issue as being significant.

Many of the differences highlighted above could also said to apply to scripting languages. Is there a category along the continuum between shell and 'programming' languages where something called a scripting language exists or does the term script imply a usage rather than a recognizable set of design decisions?