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"UNIX pipelines": Yes, this is where I stopped reading. The author claims that > UNIX pipelines routinely compose dozens of programs into complex > workflows
by mcswell 1y ago
"UNIX pipelines": Yes, this is where I stopped reading. The author claims that
> UNIX pipelines routinely compose dozens of programs into complex
> workflows, yet they require no type checking at the transport
> layer. The individual programs trust that data flowing between
> them consists of simple, agreed-upon formats—usually lines of
> text separated by newlines.
The transport layer is not the relevant layer; it's the programs in between that matter. If you're just looking for words or characters or something, that's straightforward enough--but the equivalent in programming is passing strings from one function to another. You run into problems when program 1 in the pipeline uses tab delimiters, whereas program 2 was expecting space characters or commas or something, and program 3 is expecting tokens in the pipe to be in a different order, or program 4 doesn't know what to do when some records have three tokens and others have four or two or something.