There's a nice consistency in doing it that way--it's very easy to think of cat as turning an "inert" file into a stream of data, each program as a function tha

There's a nice consistency in doing it that way--it's very easy to think of cat as turning an "inert" file into a stream of data, each program as a function that applies a transformation to a stream with a particular kind of content, and the pipe as function composition (given compatible stream content). A very comfortable programming-like perspective, at least to me. (Pop quiz: What programming idiom closely resembles this "repackage content and apply sequential transformations" approach?)