build_campus, raison d'etre?

[Luka <luka@MIT.EDU>]

any idea, anyone, why it was considered appropriate to write the
command interpreter build_campus (walkthru/mit/src/build_campus)
to process a "run script" which is effectively just a crippled
shell language (plus an uncertainty layer that comes from running
it through an underspecified interpreter)?

does it perhaps provide some internal parallelism functions, or
was it meant to improve cross-platform behavior, or what?  i'm
not seeing any good reason for it, but i could be overlooking
something.  so help me out.

this code appears to come from will leiserson (wml), 2002/06.

-pl