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While unix handles splitting into an array of strings, it still leaves parsing those strings up to the application. One of the bigger problems is the ambiguity caused by filenames starting with `-`. Some applications support the `--` marker to end such parsing, but it's inconsistently implemented and the caller has to actively remember to use it.

A typed array (e.g. by having a required single byte marker at the start of each string), or even nested structures similar to s-expressions would have avoided this.

by hnlmorg56 minutes ago|

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Funny enough, I’ve actually spent a long time trying to figure out how to solve this problem in murex but it always comes back to the same problem: anything smart I implement into the shell is immediately lost the moment I call fork().

I even considered writing a wrapper around some commands to send -- regardless of whether the user includes it or not. But that’s error prone too because

1. it’s a GNUism so you can’t guarantee compatibility with any tools that don’t call GNUs flag parsing library (which is particularly problematic outside of Linux)

2. If there a file called “-f” (for example), how do you know if the user intended that to be called as a file reference or a command flag? You then need to bake in a bunch of additional syntax sugar to make that explicit. Which results in a pretty awful user experience

3. The maintenance overhead for this would be astronomical

If UNIX were designed from day one to have that parameter type passed then this would be a very simple problem to solve. But the PDP machine UNIX was originally designed to run on wouldn’t have been powerful enough for that anyway. So once again we are limited by an architecture designed to run on mid-range systems of the 1970s.