A functional take on some shell utilities.
Values are any string of bytes that can be used as a command argument (that
is, any string of bytes not containing a \0 character.
We use \0 for terminating items in lists when reading from file descriptors.
We thus get lazy infinite lists. Compatible with the output of find -print0
and with the input of xargs -0.
String: any non '\0' containing sequence of bytes. Can appear as arguments
or on stdin.
List: A (potentially infinite) list of String types. Represented as
consecutive '\0' terminated String elements.
Some commands assume extra structure on the various inputs, for example,
some assume that a String looks like a number, or operate on elements
of a list two at a time (mapTuple).
Unfortunately, we don't have a type checker, so it is up to you to to ensure
the types match up. In some instances we can't even do run-time type checking
due to the limited nature of our encoding scheme (\0 terminated).