Comment # 10 on bug 903362 from Dr. Werner Fink

(In reply to Rich Coe from comment #9)

> alias !='fc -e -'

You're aware that the `!' is a special in (ba)sh and also in (t)csh?  See
manual page of bash(1)

 RESERVED WORDS
       Reserved  words are words that have a special meaning to the shell.  The
       following words are recognized as reserved when unquoted and either the
       first word of a simple command (see SHELL GRAMMAR below) or the third
        word of a case or for command:

       ! case  do done elif else esac fi for function if in select then until
       while { } time [[ ]]

The `!=' is only alowed within [[ .. ]] and (( ... ))