> That's just plain silly.  It is not important or necessary for "echo"
> to support '--'.  "-n" is defined to be only recognized if it is the
> _FIRST_ operand.

So, how do you get echo to produce the three characters '-', 'n', '\n'
as output?  For that matter, how do you take a user-supplied string
(which might be "-n") and echo it?  (echo -n "$stuff"; echo "") seems
awfully ugly.

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