ayrton is an extension of the Python language that tries to make it look more
like a shell programming language. The first thing to note is that it's not
intended to be a shell per se, and I think that anyone used to them for their
day to day computer usage (most notably, fellow SysAdmins) would find such a
shell too cumbersome.

One of the ideas that triggered the development of ayrton is that shell
languages have very rudimentary data handling mechanisms: most data are strings,
these strings can be treated as integers from time to time, there is no concept
of floats, and a few of them have arrays, even associative ones. For any other
data manipulation, developers have to use tools like awk, sed, grep, cut, even
Perl from time to time. In some cases this means that scripts, once they start
to grow a little, become cumbersome and/or unmaintainable.

From the other side, Python is very good for data manipulation, but some things
that are really simple and common in shell languages, like program execution,
are a little more complex in Python. A very good alternative for this is the sh
module, but in some aspects it still leaves an alien flavor to a shell
programmer. Here is where ayrton comes in and tries to fill in that gap.
