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0 pointsTeMPOraL9y ago0 comments

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.

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qwertyuiop9249y ago

...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.

TeMPOraLOP9y ago

> ...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.

mbrock9y ago

Heh heh, "someone in power." Who would that be?

There's no authority to complain to about all this...

Structured text formats come and go: S-expressions, SGML, XML, JSON, "modified JSON", etc etc etc...

Fortunately the Unix tools work the same with any byte stream, pretty much, so they've survived gloriously since the 1970s.

That's kind of the whole deal with "worse is better."

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pwdisswordfish9y ago

But then when you put structured data through pipes, why bother with making it text at all (over the wire, at least)?

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