[Newbies] FFI versus BASH

[Chris Cunnington]

I have a question that I imagine is going to reveal a big gap in my 
knowledge. Oh well.

I have a framework such as QuickTime that I want to send a message to. 
In Sophie I can execute some code in a Workspace and it will go to the 
FFI, send a message to the QT framework, and then return. But I can't do 
that in BASH.

To send a message to the library, I'd need to write a text file, 
compile, and then execute. Then the response comes back into the 
Terminal. Why can't I just enter Carbon functions in the shell and do 
what Workspace/FFI does?

Or, does FFI compile on the fly and then de-compile to put an answer in 
Workspace?

The real question here, I think, is what is a message in Linux? Is it a 
stream of bits with meta data?

A message is being sent to the library, but I don't grok what that 
message is. Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Chris