shortusername

Clunky is subjective -- I think we can probably agree that there are clunkier, more opaque, and harder to work with constructs in programming than a slightly different syntax for array declaration.

What are these build systems where you need to install Bash? Bash 4 was released in 2009: it's been in every major Linux distribution for at least two major versions, ditto for FreeBSD... heck, even Solaris ships with it now.