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by ori_b 3278 days ago
> what a more modern shell might look to address some of the problems of its predecessors like pipes that are essentially text-only, poor composability (see `cut` or `xargs`)

A new system and set of utilities. None of the Unix environment works in that world, and shoehorning it in would feel incredibly clunky.
1 comments
panic 3278 days ago
If you use bytes that are invalid in UTF-8 (e.g. 0xF5-0xFF) as delimiters / structure characters, you can use text-only tools to do structured operations on UTF-8 strings without ever having to escape anything -- the structural "characters" you would need to escape can never appear in the encoded bytes.
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carussell 3277 days ago
> If you use bytes that are invalid in UTF-8 (e.g. 0xF5-0xFF) as delimiters / structure characters

No need for that. UTF-8 is a superset of ASCII, and ASCII already includes a handful of control codes that could be used here.

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ori_b 3278 days ago
The Unix shell operates on binary streams, not on text.
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panic 3278 days ago
Ah, I thought this was about structured text (like JSON) vs. plain text -- binary content is a bigger issue!
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ori_b 3278 days ago
If you want to replace the shell with a structured one, the change needs to be pervasive, down to replacing the typical file formats, imo.
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