Well, the only other way I can think of that it could be done is the Windows way, whereby you pass the unparsed command line, spaces and all, as a string to the new process. And while this is arguably the cleaner interface, in practice it has meant even worse quote handling, since how -- or even whether -- double quotes are parsed now depends on the probably undocumented process startup code chosen by the program's compiler vendor.

Want to quote a command line that may already contain double quotes, in order to pass it as an argument to some other program? No, you don't. It isn't right to want that.