Re: does formatting matter

[Stephane Chazelas]

2020-01-14 09:07:36 -0500, Greg Wooledge:
[...]
> The VERY first Bourne shell may not have understood the compact
> form, with ;then on the first line.  It's hard to be sure nowadays,
> because you're asking about stuff that happened 42 years ago.
[...]

It's actually relatively easy to run Unix V7 (and many other
early Unices from the 70s) on a PDP11 emulator these days as
tape archives have been made publicly available.

See for instance http://gunkies.org/wiki/Installing_v7_on_SIMH
https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/ancient/

Here on v7 using simh:

$ ls -l /bin/sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 bin     17310 Jun  8  1979 /bin/sh

$ if test 1 = 1; then echo yes; else echo no; fi
yes
$ if(test 1=1)then echo yes;else echo no;fi
yes

-- 
Stephane