I did try psh, as the documentation sounded promising.  Unfortunately, it didn't work well at all, and threw regex exceptions on every command I tried.  But from its writeup, the objectives sounded like what I needed.

Here's an example of something I'd like a shell to be capable of (and this would be "piece of cake" in Perl) -- allow a history listing mechanism that not only shows last N commands, but lets you search using a regex for matching commands:

    h 15                 # Would give the last 15 commands (like "hist
+ory 15")
    h word1 word2 word3  # Would list commands containing all of the g
+iven words
    h /^(vim?|emacs)\b/  # Would list all editing commands (vi, vim, e
+macs)
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This kind of task would be perfect for the powerful idioms in Perl!