Yeah, but that's the point. Pipes are fine. The tools suck, though. UNIX would be infinitely better if it defaulted to piping structured text instead of making each tool have to implement its own shotgun parser.
...So you're talking about having text-serialized key-value objects (or any other kind of object), with standard deserializers and tools for manipulation?
That's actually a great idea. Better yet, it's actually viable now, unlike many proposals for "fixing" unix.
> ...So you're talking about having text-serialized key-value objects (or any other kind of object), with standard deserializers and tools for manipulation?
Yes, basically. Someone in power should just pick any format - modified JSON (without the integers are really IEEE754 floats stupidity), s-expressions, whatever - and make standard deserializers part of the system library.
