I recently just had great success using coroutines to build a sort of function pipeline that can work in both code and at the command line with minimal effort;

I recently just had great success using coroutines to build a sort of function pipeline that can work in both code and at the command line with minimal effort; I'm doing a lot of text processing. A contrived example that prints the numbers in range(0, 100) ends up looking something like this: @producer def prod(): for i in range(0,100): yield i @producer @consumer def middleman(): for i in (yield): yield i @consumer def cons(): for i in (yield): print i Producers can yield values and consumers can use yield to get their input. I will fully admit that code, abstracted away by those decorators, is not the prettiest and took a minute to understand when writing. The biggest gotcha was with both a producer and consumer. You have to be very careful to capture the return value of the generator.send(input) call as it ends up being the item of the first yield. Also, pure consumers will immediately throw a StopIteration exception after sending the input. I'm very glad, however, that I stumbled upon using generators in this way as it results in a very clean implementation at this level. The internals are a little dicey, however, which I think is what you're eluding to. I use the functions in multiprocessing.Process objects as the target by first binding them to pipes and also without binding them to anything, in which case they use stdin/stdout.