Ambitions for a Unix Shell
&quot;So the biggest change is that Oil will be based on strings (and arrays of strings) like shell&quot;<p>I would advise the author have a look at the internals of Tcl, not because you should copy all the sophisticated features immediately, but because it demonstrates a way to have both &quot;everything is a string&quot; <i>and</i> &quot;advanced data structures&quot; in a relatively principled manner. You don&#x27;t have to start out with all the optimizations from day one but I always find it helpful to have a look down the road in cases like this, and make sure that if this sort of thing interests you that you don&#x27;t accidentally make it impossible later.