6 ms·

> what a more modern shell might look to address some of the problems of its predecessors like pipes that are essentially text-only, poor composability (see `cu

by ori_b 9y ago

> what a more modern shell might look to address some of the problems of its predecessors like pipes that are essentially text-only, poor composability (see `cut` or `xargs`) A new system and set of utilities. None of the Unix environment works in that world, and shoehorning it in would feel incredibly clunky.

panic 9y ago
If you use bytes that are invalid in UTF-8 (e.g. 0xF5-0xFF) as delimiters / structure characters, you can use text-only tools to do structured operations on UTF-8 strings without ever having to escape anything -- the structural "characters" you would need to escape can never appear in the encoded bytes.
- ori_b 9y ago
  The Unix shell operates on binary streams, not on text.
  - panic 9y ago
    Ah, I thought this was about structured text (like JSON) vs. plain text -- binary content is a bigger issue!
    - ori_b 9y ago
      If you want to replace the shell with a structured one, the change needs to be pervasive, down to replacing the typical file formats, imo.
- carussell 9y ago
  > If you use bytes that are invalid in UTF-8 (e.g. 0xF5-0xFF) as delimiters / structure characters No need for that. UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII, and ASCII already includes a handful of control codes that could be used here.