I am really curious about how much parsing and formatting occupy *nix source code. (IIRC 30% of ls), and if it would be a good idea to decouple the way you mention it. my json-infused distro is still on my mind.
ps: this lisp machine talk mention how 'programs' (I guess functions) exchanged plain old data rather than serialized ascii streams making things very fast. There are caveats of adress space sharing though but it's another nice hint we could investigate other ways.
That's an interesting point. abstracting out parsing/serialization from the data piped between commands would lead to more consistent argument handling for all commands.
somebody wrote docopt (started as python lib) as a generic POSIX usage string parsing (part of the standard). Maybe it could lead to simpler argument parsing and 'user interface' generation, whether static documentation or shell completion scripts.
Also structured output may lead to more relation tools, less regexful ad-hoc parsing, maybe some kind of typecheck so callers can be notified when they need to be rewritten.
ps: this lisp machine talk mention how 'programs' (I guess functions) exchanged plain old data rather than serialized ascii streams making things very fast. There are caveats of adress space sharing though but it's another nice hint we could investigate other ways.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk