Or... if designing a program meant to work in a shell environment that is all text that comes with text parsing tools, provide a normalized, easily parsed outp

Or... if designing a program meant to work in a shell environment that is all text that comes with text parsing tools, provide a normalized, easily parsed output option. Processing structured data is great, but like a lot of complaints here, it's basically "why didn't they just choose this much more complex and time consuming option that was as yet unproven?"