2 thoughts:
1.  Is there a more appropriate list?
2.  Speaking of merging in features, why not make the special char ~, and
merge the ~user hacks out of the shells and into path name lookups, if
we're looking for a convenience?  This would be undeniable cruft, but a
suitably generic implementation would be much more powerful.  The idea
would be that ~ was current user's home directory, ~foo would be foo's
home directory, and perhaps ~:arch would be the architechture.  The
problems would be greater, but it would be a nice unixy feature; too
powerful and confusing for most people to get any benefit from.

And you could symlink your bin to ~/bin and have snoopers always discover
that you unaccountably have *exactly* the same collection of files that
they do!  :)

Obviously, by the time the escape processing was in, to allow you to
specify ~s in names, it would be horrid... But maybe someone can offer
a nice clean solution.

-s