On 2011-10-22 09:35, Connor Lane Smith wrote: > > the representation of data would be a concern of each program, not of > the terminal, which would probably result in ugly.
Let's separate the concerns: UI and Data UI = users should be able to be retarded && dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/face This is a good thing. Data = we don't have good backwards compatibility protection; we insert another column output to `ls -al` and all hell breaks loose. Our current workaround = run POSIX only commands and don't change. > The type inference would be done per command, so cat(1) would be of a > type such that if you were to try catting an image (directly) to wc(1) > it would fail, because the types (Image, String) would not match. You > could also have awesome higher-order functions, so 'map' would remove > the need for find(1), etc. It seems like too much; probably only need a few generic ones: string, number, binary, list, hash. Too many types will hurt us just like re-inventing tar as MIME as output delimiter hurt us. > we ought to optimise for effectiveness of use by the user Absolutely; perhaps by reducing the output options of our programs. ;) Patrick
