writing commands involving many pipes is unnatural

[hayeah]

as I must think about the piping first in order to write the cmd

[sohocoke]

All of the commands in the examples wiki page except for the last one, are examples of the issue.

The issue is apparent the more I try to get something done by chaining shorter idioms with pipes, e.g.

grep -ir 'my_name' . | awk -F: {print $1} | less

While the last example, grep("-ir foo app").map { |l| puts l.split(":").first } , lets me think in the same order, it does require a lot of typing.

[sohocoke]

The above example also won't work past 1 pipe.

What if you accepted input such as: grep('-ir foo app').pipe(awk '-F: {print $1}').pipe less

or an even more controversial version that would be more shell-like:

grep :ir 'foo' 'app' | awk :F: '{print $1}' | less

I wrote this one thinking the repl method would need to convert the input.

[hayeah]

this is one design decision i thought quite a lot about earlier on. i wanted Rubish to have kosher Ruby syntax. It's unfortunate that operators precedence rules out

grep :ir 'foo' 'app' | awk :F: '{print $1}' | less

Did you know about the pipe command in Rubish (it's not documented in the wiki). It's minimizes the number of keystrokes requires to move from a command to a pipe, while staying proper Ruby syntax.

p { cmd1; cmd2; cmd3 }

The advantage of using ";" is that we don't have to close the parentheses. To transform a command into a pipe, the overhead is 5 key strokes, in two "chunks" of edits

cmd1 "a", "b" 

p { cmd1 "a", "b" ; cmd2 }

I don't think it's a good idea to introduce meta syntax, because that makes the shell unpredictable, and works against a clean integration with normal Ruby.

[hayeah]

an alternative syntax could be

(cmd1 arg1, arg2) | (cmd2 arg2) | (cmd3 args)

cmd1(arg1, arg2) | cmd2(arg2) | cmd3(args)

[sohocoke]

I like cmd1(arg1, arg2) | cmd2(arg2) | cmd3(args)

The problem with 'p { .. }' is that one needs to first think about the pipe. I found nearly all the time that I typed in a command, then realised I needed a pipe, then had to move the cursor a lot to include all the commands inside the braces for p.

[hayeah]

cool. you've got a great point. we'll use the | operator for piping commands