Both gnu and bsd grep input and output a stream of bytes.
Without ever having tried it, I know that one random day when I for whatever reason have a wish to take the output from bsd grep and send it over tcp through netcat, to be collected by zsh's built-in tcp support and fed in to gnu's grep, it will work. No piece along the way made any jerk assumptions or required any any jerk tight coupling, and the bsd and gnu tools were completely compatible.
That is more valuable and greater convenience than any other poorly concieved ideas to make it more convenient.
This all 50 years after unix pipes were invented and in an environment the inventors did not even try to predict and handle. Instead they handled infinity by not trying to predict anything. They just made useful low level tools which you assemble however you may turn out to need to, and the tools make as few as possible assumptions which will all eventually break. The hammer doesn't only work with one kind of nail.
Without ever having tried it, I know that one random day when I for whatever reason have a wish to take the output from bsd grep and send it over tcp through netcat, to be collected by zsh's built-in tcp support and fed in to gnu's grep, it will work. No piece along the way made any jerk assumptions or required any any jerk tight coupling, and the bsd and gnu tools were completely compatible.
That is more valuable and greater convenience than any other poorly concieved ideas to make it more convenient.
This all 50 years after unix pipes were invented and in an environment the inventors did not even try to predict and handle. Instead they handled infinity by not trying to predict anything. They just made useful low level tools which you assemble however you may turn out to need to, and the tools make as few as possible assumptions which will all eventually break. The hammer doesn't only work with one kind of nail.