Oh for explicity typed IO.
(Sadly command-line programs have yet to pass the threshold of even having a types system at all.)
(Sadly command-line programs have yet to pass the threshold of even having a types system at all.)
Seriously, MS doesn't do everything great, but Powershell has typed pipes (typed everything, actually, it's not just stringly like *sh) which are seriously awesome.
The NOS/VE shell had string types and integer types at least. The experience was absolutely horrible. It's hard for me to remember much other than the difficulty of getting anything practical to work, and that may be a consequence of CDC's incredibly poor design choices for the "shell" rather than the types. But I personally have never said "Oh, for a type system in this darn shell!" since then.