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Because you don't like the design(I don't either) but it carries information.

Someone could have thought it was a good idea and no one was willing to audit all of UCB's scripts to fix the "bug" even if it had been the result of a lazy implementation because ed(1) on a terminal.

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My choice of wording is from my assumption that nobody, at any point, actually wanted that behaviour. And I stand by that being a pretty safe bet.

So I wouldn't refer to it as "the design". It's not that the methods are unsound, it's that I don't see any method at all.

As for not wanting to break existing scripts, OpenBSD is not even remotely as concerned about backwards compatibility as Linux is. I don't mean that in a derogatory way. It's a perfectly cromulent choice.

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