[TUHS] Origins of shell prompt suffixes % $ > #

[Kurt H Maier]

On Mon, Aug 06, 2018 at 09:53:33PM +0100, Brian Zick wrote:
>
> rc uses ;
       
Does it?  10th edition Unix and Plan 9 rc both have ('% ' ' ') as the   
default value of $prompt.  At least that's how it's described in the
manual.  None of the v8/9/10 tarballs in the archive contain rc code,
but some contain manual source, and those describe % prompts.

I've seen other references to ; (presumably  ('; ' ' ')) as the rc 
prompt but I've never seen it in the wild.  Does anyone here know what 
the story is?
       
khm