I think I like the theory of this but in practicality I'm pretty sure I'd just get irritated by it. In most usage, there is only one input and output format, be

I think I like the theory of this but in practicality I'm pretty sure I'd just get irritated by it. In most usage, there is only one input and output format, being plain text. If I specify a given type further and send it to grep/awk/sed/cut, I'd need to explicitly or implicitly coerce the given output to plain text, at which point I'd either lose the original type information or require some unholy transformations to retrieve the original type. I think this misses how I use the shell: sending plain text information to and from files and executables. The whole point is that there is no type system and everything is just plain text. For something smarter that behaves more like a typed programming language, there's Perl, Python, etc.