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What's the failing part? Someone declares 'lines in a text file' to be a set and then proceeds to write 'set operations' for them out of your basic unix text processing utilities. Unsurprisingly, it both works and doesn't look like the first thing that would come to mind when thinking of set operations. But then, does 'grep [linenoise]' look like 'finding a string' to those unfamiliar with it?

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Yeah, in a way, this sort of thing is indicative of a turing tarpit.

It's not obvious which, among all the moving parts, is responsible for any of the outcomes, just by looking at the commands themselves in isolation.

If someone did a similar thing in Brainfuck it wouldn't be entirely surprising that such a thing is possible, but the practicality of being able to getting it right every time, extemporaneously, is low.

It's interesting to know that this is possible, in case of emergency, but just because it's possible doesn't make it desirable.

If someone wrote an article about how to do the same in MS DOS batch files, circa 1996, it'd be an interesting proof of robustness, but an undesirable standard operating procedure.

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