a more light-weight Woosh?

[http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert (Robert)]

I like your idea of Woosh (I haven't used it, 'though :-), but I was hoping
for something that was more light-weight.  I mean, I'd use something like
Ruby, Python, or even Perl, but 99% of the time, in a shell script, I call
other scripts or executables -- I'd rather not have to say 'system("blah")'
for each script or executable I want to call.  I notice lots of recurring
patterns in my shell scripts, particularly the larger ones, but it seems like
breaking it down into classes would make the most sense and flexibility.

Do you know of anything like this?  Perhaps a mutated Python where unknown
keywords or object references would instead resolve as calling another
shell script or executable?

Thanks.