Fun with Monad?

Remember command.com and .bat files? Still using them? I recently downloaded Microsoft’s new command shell (available here). The key idea seems to be to make 99% of the internals of a MS Windows based computer accessible to a command shell. Whereas the Unix tradition of shells have commands linked together by consuming and producing text – in Monad commands consume and produce objects. The objects also have the ability to convert themselves to a canonical text form which could be consumed by non-Monad aware commands. Neat idea. Special attention has been paid to security but the syntax is terrible. What kind of a language has comparision operators like a -eq b meaning “is a equal to b? Haven’t yet come across a task where learning Monad’s steep learning curve seemed to be necessary.