[delta_p_delta_x]

To do this, you'd have to have some sort of common runtime, and nearly all command-line utilities would have to be compiled with said runtime, so that the parameters, names, and types of parameters for said utilities could be returned, parsed, and verified as a data structure, without having to manually parse the output of some `command --help` invocation.

It would thoroughly dispense with the whole argument parsing routine in the first place, which could now be done in a standardised manner; arguments could be defined as strict types with possible values limited to a set, and best of all, they wouldn't just be a dictionary/hash-map of strings to strings—the arguments could actually be named variables with values, in the context of the called utility.

It would certainly be quite a powerful shell, and I'm sure something similar has already been done. I just can't think of an example..... A Powerful shell, running on some Common Language Runtime; I wonder what it could be.