On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 3:17 AM, Alexander Pánek <[email protected]> wrote: > > The thing is, I don't *want* my _shell_ to be able to parse anything. It's a > shell, not a framework with everything and two kitchensinks built in to > parse every imaginable file format on my computer. That's the whole point of > the UNIX philosophy: small, encapsulated tools that do one or a few tasks > very well.
The point is that Unix uses text (and parses text) because it forces you to make everything into a file. One program has to spend a whole lot of effort producing nicely-formatted output, only to have it piped to another program which just undoes all that work. Then you have "magical" files like the things in /proc where they query the OS for data and output it as text. The point of Powershell is to keep the data in the format that it started as, avoiding all the annoying (and inefficient) transcoding to and from text files.
