The first line was always to turn off echo, and I've always wondered why that was a decision for batch script. Or I'm misremembering. 30 years of separation makes it hard to remember the details.

IIRC readline uses a `char *` internally since the length of a user-edited line is fairly bounded.

Dealing with the corner cases ends up teaching you a lot about a language and for an ancient language like the shell, dealing with the corner cases also takes you through the thinking process of the original authors and the constraints they were subject to. I found myself in this situation while writing EndBASIC and wrote an article with the surprises I encountered, because I found the journey fascinating: https://www.endbasic.dev/2023/01/endbasic-parsing-difficulti...

We can easily imagine it done a better way - for all the criticism of Windows, PowerShell gives a glimpse into this hypothetical future.