The following reply was made to PR misc/23729; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: dholland@eecs.harvard.edu (David Holland)
To: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
Cc: 
Subject: Re: misc/23729: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2006 21:07:25 -0400 (EDT)

 As of now, the only widely used shells that try to run files that
 won't exec() are sh and ksh. All the others fail, which you can verify
 by taking your favorite hello.c, compiling, and then editing the
 binary to replace "ld_elf.so" with, say, "ld_alf.so". This produces
 these results:
 
    % csh -c ./hullo 
    ./hullo: Exec format error. Wrong Architecture.
 
    % bash -c ./hullo 
    bash: ./hullo: cannot execute binary file
 
    % tcsh -c ./hullo 
    ./hullo: Exec format error. Binary file not executable.
 
    % zsh -c ./hullo 
    zsh: exec format error: ./hullo
 
 and
 
    % sh -c ./hullo 
    ./hullo: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
 
    % ksh -c ./hullo 
    ./hullo: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
 
 The behavior exhibited by sh and ksh is historic, but hasn't been
 useful since #! was invented, which was a long time ago.
 
 Probably the best thing to do is to remove it.
 
 -- 
    - David A. Holland / dholland@eecs.harvard.edu