typed pipes in every shell

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2021-06-17 02:00:11

Powershell and nushell take unix piping beyond raw streams of text to structured or typed data. Is it possible to keep a traditional shell like bash and still get typed pipes?

I think it is possible, and I'm now surprised noone seems to have done it yet. This is a fairly detailed design for how to do it. I've not implemented it yet. RFC.

What typed does is discover the types of the commands to its left and its right, while communicating the type of the command it runs back to them. Then it checks if the types match, and runs the command, communicating the type information to it. Pipes are unidirectional, so it may seem hard to discover the type to the right, but I'll explain how it can be done in a minute.

Now suppose that foo generates json, and bar filters structured data of a variety of types, and baz consumes csv and pretty-prints a table. Then bar will be informed that its input is supposed to be json, and that its output should be csv. If bar didn't support json, typed foo and typed bar would both fail with a type error.

Writing "typed" in front of everything is annoying. But it can be made a shell alias like "t". It also possible to wrap programs using typed: