Trying to write shell code in Rebol, you notice that bash has a pretty strong advantage of putting together fragments of text with environment variables.
I think we'd have a leg up if there were a behavior in something that didn't reduce strings--like FORM--if it would make an exception for GROUP!s.
Historically you get something pretty useless:
rebol2>> form [--sysroot (first [/foo /bar])]
== "--sysroot first /foo /bar"
red>> form [--sysroot (first [/foo /bar])]
== "--sysroot first /foo /bar"
I don't see that helping a whole lot. Evaluating the group would make more sense.
>> form [--sysroot (first [/foo /bar])]
== "--sysroot /foo"
As an aside, I've always thought FORM is a weird name for this. Maybe it needs a better name.
But whatever it is, I think we need something like it for putting together bash-like "sentences", without having to use so many quotes...because every character adds up:
>> spaced [{--sysroot} (first ["/foo" "/bar"])]
== "--sysroot /foo"
I'll point out that having greater flexibility on what is a legal PATH!, permitting foo/bar/ and /foo/ etc. really is already helping a lot for common cases of writing shell-like scripts.