> You can’t write a function that returns a list of files because the shell doesn’t know what a “list” is, doesn’t know what “files” are, and couldn’t tell you

> You can’t write a function that returns a list of files because the shell doesn’t know what a “list” is, doesn’t know what “files” are, and couldn’t tell you the difference between a “function” and a “program” if its life depended on it. Could it be that what this article is really groping towards is Perl? I mean Perl not as it has become, but as it was -- Perl 4 perhaps: basically the capabilities of the shell, augmented with a couple of data structures. So there are strings, lists, hashes, and functions, and that's pretty much it.