I like the way this "COMMAND$" was changed for QB64.
With QuickBASIC and MS-DOS it was impossible to get lowercase letters from the terminal prompt. Although that's not the reason why the GNU people responsible for "getopt" library decided to create the "long" options besides cryptic switches like "-rf" and "-Fs" ...
Before making "COMMAND$" like an array there was the task of creating a dynamic string array to process the whole "COMMAND$" value according to spaces. It worked well, but I easily abandoned it in favor of "COMMAND$(1)" and so on.
The "flaw" with "COMMAND$(0)" was inherited from the C runtime library and some ancient libraries and scripts for Unix and descendants actually depend on it.
With QuickBASIC and MS-DOS it was impossible to get lowercase letters from the terminal prompt. Although that's not the reason why the GNU people responsible for "getopt" library decided to create the "long" options besides cryptic switches like "-rf" and "-Fs" ...
Before making "COMMAND$" like an array there was the task of creating a dynamic string array to process the whole "COMMAND$" value according to spaces. It worked well, but I easily abandoned it in favor of "COMMAND$(1)" and so on.
The "flaw" with "COMMAND$(0)" was inherited from the C runtime library and some ancient libraries and scripts for Unix and descendants actually depend on it.