You may not realize it, but your little funny quip does actually rely on a deep mathematical equivalence: LINQ is basically syntax for monads, and unix shell pr

You may not realize it, but your little funny quip does actually rely on a deep mathematical equivalence: LINQ is basically syntax for monads, and unix shell programming can be seen as monadic, too: http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/monadic-shell.html http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/monadic-shell.html So, in a way, yes, it is the same, but that is exactly the point.