Reserved words and the type builtin

[Glenn Morris]

[ I originally tried to post this direct to the gnu.bash.bug
newsgroup, but that seems to be dead. I apologize if you get this
twice. ]


Bash 2.05b, Red Hat 7.3.

The `type' builtin checks arguments in the order:
alias, keyword, function, builtin, file

But it seems as if command parsing uses the order:
keyword, alias, function, builtin


This seems inconsistent and confusing to me, eg:

bash> alias time='echo "this is an alias"'
bash> type time
time is aliased to `echo "this is an alias"'
bash> time ls

real    0m0.010s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.010s


On a slightly related, "philosophical" issue, why is time a reserved
word rather than a builtin? I'd prefer to use GNU /usr/bin/time, but
it seems there is no way (?) for me to disable the interpretation of
time as a bash reserved word (other than using \time on every
occasion, or compiling bash with --disable-command-timing).

Thanks in advance.