That sounds kind of like a console, no?

Edit: I mean, if the intent is gaming and only gaming, it feels like there’s a lot of overlap. Only the PC would have less support for more freedom.

So, just to be clear, that ‘something that can’t be overcome’ is… checks notes capitalism?

There actually is an array in any POSIX shell. You get one array per file/function. It just feels bad to use it. You can abuse ‘set – 1 2 3 4’ to act as a proper array. You can then use ‘for’ without ‘in’ to iterate over it.

for i; do echo $i; done.

Use shift <number> to pop items off.

If I really have to use something more complex, I’ll reach for mkfifo instead so I can guarantee the data can only be consumed once without manipulating entries.