I enjoyed The Diamond Age but the 'AI' is nothing like today's. The stories in Nell's primer are actually mediated by a human actor (not an AI), who becomes a mother figure for her.
It even goes so far as to call out the ones who were interfacing with AI as disadvantaged and manipulation of the advanced AI developed for the Chinese orphans led to the creation of the mouse army who were categorically trained to worship specific people as their leader which they otherwise had never known.
Do you have a real-world example where we would like to preserve `$?` after the `if` (which `if` specifically branches on the result code of the command it tests)? Where we want to use the actual return code that the `if` did not handle itself.
I am asking because I have never needed preserving the `$?` outside of an `if`, nor have I ever seen this in somebody else's scripts, and I'm curious.
(thank you, cassepipe)