I noticed the contrived Python example too, but yours will explode if the input is too big, so, it's not equivalent to Shell, which will buffer the input. Stil

I noticed the contrived Python example too, but yours will explode if the input is too big, so, it's not equivalent to Shell, which will buffer the input. Still, even with that in mind, Python variant could've been greatly simplified. To give the author the benefit of a doubt: they probably made such a contrived example on purpose to underscore their point, but it's hard to find small-scale examples which illustrate verbosity... On the other hand, I might be overthinking on behalf of the author. Doubt they explicitly set out to make a contrived example. They probably wrote what they wrote and were happy with the result because it helped them to make a compelling argument, and they didn't think to analyze their own illustrations too deeply to see if they might disagree with their conclusions.