Re: type checking/signalling shell and utilities?

[Jonathan Thornburg]

If you want to experiment in that direction, Tom Duff's 'rc' shell
has 'list of words' as a primative, and avoids re-parsing strings.
See
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rc
for more information.  There doesn't seem to be an OpenBSD port of rc
(but there is 'es', which claims to be derived from rc).