And it IS a basic feature of Java. Just not one that is used much, and therefore not one that has a particularly clear or succinct idiom. Java didn't grow up i

And it IS a basic feature of Java. Just not one that is used much, and therefore not one that has a particularly clear or succinct idiom. Java didn't grow up in the world of unix where scripts that read from stdin and write to stdout get chained to produce pipelines. It grew up in the world of long-running stand-alone applications that communicate over sockets (like web applications). Java, because of the virtual machine, has a particularly slow start-up time and would be a poor choice for implementing mini pipeline components like this anyway.