I really liked z3bra's idea of writing something that the participants may use after the competition.

The situation is slightly more complex, this is an official competition with professional judges, not a casual, friendly thing made by some students. I can't just write an RSS reader without making it extremely unique, making it essentially a different type of program, not an rss reader anymore. If it's not unique I don't get points, so I have to innovate quite a bit. I didn't have any ideas for what such an innovation may be, so I created this thread to exchange ideas. I'm sorry for letting this confusion happen.

I am currently working on a new shell based on posix shell and the sam text editor. It will allow you to manipulate text using sam-like commands and use other unix tools on the system for text processing and scripting. With the power of sam addresses and commands, and unix tools, you could use this shell i'm building either as a script-friendlier shell or as an alternative for awk!