[anom9999]

You don't need support for complex data types for a shell to be described as "REPL".

REPL is just a Turing-complete real time interpreter. Which means even the VBA "Immediate" panel in (as seen in MS Office) is REPL. And it means Bash is REPL too.

The question you're raising is whether all REPLs are equal. Lisp machines definitely had more control over the host than VBA does. But that doesn't mean that VBA's immediate panel isn't REPL just because a more powerful example exists.

As for Bash, that's a bit of a weird one because Bash wouldn't be much without the accompanying GNU / POSIX userland. But if you're willing to include a UNIX / Linux userland into scope then Bash has just as much control over the host as Lisp did on Lisp machines. But even without the aid of forking additional executables, Bash can still modify the state of the kernel directly. eg

    echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
    echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

(For those who may not have been aware, echo is a built in command in Bash)

[pjmlp]

You are missing the part about manipulating other applications or controling GUI elements, like Powershell kind of allows via DLL interop and OLE Automation.

As for /proc/sys, not all UNIXes have such features.

In Oberon I could pipe selected text from any application into any command that had a GUI aware type signature, for example.

[anom9999]

> You are missing the part about manipulating other applications or controling GUI elements, like Powershell kind of allows via DLL interop and OLE Automation.

There are lots of command line hooks for GUIs. Want to copy data to the clipboard from the command line? xclip. Want to pop up a notification in your desktop environment's notification bar? notify-send "hello world!" etc

> As for /proc/sys, not all UNIXes have such features.

That example of mine was clearly taken from Linux - so it goes without saying that most UNIXes would behave different in that specific regard. Even so, they'd still have command line tools for doing the same thing (and to be fair, Linux does too, even with a vaguely-Plan 9 virtual file system)

> In Oberon I could pipe selected text from any application into any command that had a GUI aware type signature, for example.

Well like I said, I'm not trying to say that all REPL's are equal, but most of what you're describing is still possible in at least Linux. I'm not saying it's as intuitive nor "pretty" as it would have been on the Oberon, but it's certainly possible.

To be quite honest, most of what you've been posting on this topic has really just been elitism. And I do actually sympathise with your point as working in Bash can be a complete hateful mess at times (even without comparing it to the old Lisp machines). But that doesn't change the fact that Bash is a REPL environment.