Stupid bash question

[Dean S. Messing]

Tony Nelson writes:
: The reason seems weak to me, but test does not require a closing square
: bracket, while [ does, and:
: 
: At 6:22 PM +0200 5/11/07, Stepan Kasal wrote:
: >Hi,
: >
: >On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 04:44:39PM +0200, Matthias Saou wrote:
: >> single square brackets, I thought "[" was a symlink to the
: >> coreutils "test" command, [..]
: >
: >AFAIK, it used to be hard link, not symlink.
: >
: >> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 32168 Apr 17 13:48 /usr/bin/[
: >> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 29544 Apr 17 13:48 /usr/bin/test
: >
: >GNU Coding Standards now declare that the behaviour of binary
: >should not depend on its name.

The new coding standards put quite a crimp in the use of
/sbin/busybox, /sbin/lvm, and a lot of other useful linux modules, I
would think.

What's the rationale behind this standard?  I've written several
useful pieces of signal processing code whose behaviour depends on the
name one uses to call it.  Now, self-modifying code---that I can
understand. :-)

Dean