Unix has gotten pretty far using just text and return codes. But there's no need to be dogmatic about it I guess, it could be nice to pass objects around, rather than text, like Powershell does. Although, their implementation seems quite verbose.

I think to really use something like that, I'd want a well-defined ordering for the fields and the ability to also do something like

variable.1

in addition to

variable.someLongFieldName

This could result in less than obvious scripts, but a shell language also needs to be compact, for interactive usage.