Yeah I agree. In Oil I'm hoping to have the best of both worlds. That is, no silly quoting and parsing of strings, but also being able to use plain tools like

Yeah I agree. In Oil I'm hoping to have the best of both worlds. That is, no silly quoting and parsing of strings, but also being able to use plain tools like "grep", and probably SQL. https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Structured-Data-in-Oil https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Structured-Data-in-Oil Note that R has some popular packages that allow SQL syntax over data frames. So basically the history file could be a textual table. You could trivially import it into a database, or you can just grep it.