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I remember someone made an interesting point that the notable thing about traditional shell scripting languages (as opposed to conventional scripting languages) is that the filesystem is effectively the "top level scope" of the language. i.e. you can refer to files (paths) much like they are variables that are ambiently defined.

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Yeah, and environment variables as well. It's notable that the syntax for reading an environment variable in bash is identical to the syntax for reading a "normal", process local variable (though setting is slightly different, you have to use "export"). It's like the ground scope is "the computing environment" (files, processes, env vars, ...), not the "program sandbox".

Agreed.

Then again nothing stops a general-purpose language from providing a built-in syntax & data type for paths, see e.g. Nix.

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