>Hopefully you also don't mean XML, which is terrible to parse with standard UNIX tools like grep, sed, and AWK. More complications for negligible gains.
I'd prefer a type system so I can use these tools like a library. Most of them only work on piped data or files.
A recent example is that I needed to diff files. There are existing programs and I didn't want to reinvent the wheel, I just needed that particular wheel to build something else.
To use the existing programs I had to write to a file, which is too slow for my use case. It would be much easier if I could hand these tools a pointer to my in memory data structures and get the diff back in another structure.
This is one reason why we often see libraries replicated /bin. Powershell did a good job of solving this (but was too flawed in other ways).
I'd prefer a type system so I can use these tools like a library. Most of them only work on piped data or files.
A recent example is that I needed to diff files. There are existing programs and I didn't want to reinvent the wheel, I just needed that particular wheel to build something else.
To use the existing programs I had to write to a file, which is too slow for my use case. It would be much easier if I could hand these tools a pointer to my in memory data structures and get the diff back in another structure.
This is one reason why we often see libraries replicated /bin. Powershell did a good job of solving this (but was too flawed in other ways).