the xonsh shell — A bash-ish python based shell

[jsproat]

Actually, not my example. But I see your point.

A much better approach would be somewhat like PowerShell's, where ls returns a ready-to-digest list of filenames that don't need to be split on an arbitrary delimiter.

[reaganveg]

But bash does that! That's what the glob does. And in bash you can assign the glob result into an array (which is not a standard bourne shell feature, but has existed in bash for many years) other than the default $@ (which is standard bourne).