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After well over a decade of forced contentment with a substandard command line interface, today's users of Windows have one of the most advanced shell command line interfaces, Windows PowerShell, at their disposal. It offers excellent extensiblity with script and binary (.NET) modules, and a rich provider interface for custom data stores. HDF5 seems a natural candidate and during this lightning talk we will demonstrate a snapshot of such an extension, dubbed PSH5X.
PSH5X resembles scripting modules such as h5py in some regards, but offers an overall different user experience.
"In the end, there's no hard-and-fast distinction between a shell language and a scripting language. Some of the features that make a good scripting language result in a poor shell user experience. Conversely, some of the features that make for a good interactive shell experience can interfere with scripting. Because PowerShell's goal is to be both a good scripting language and a good interactive shell, balancing the tradeoffs between user experience and scripting authoring was one of the major language design challenges." (Bruce Payette, Windows PowerShell in Action)