On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 10:33:07PM +0100, Julio M. Merino Vidal wrote:
I see absolutely no reason to not move to something which is inherently more logical like:
a > b > c > d
Hmm indeed, much clearer. Any special reason about why you used the '>' operator in the example? I'm wondering if '|' could make sense (from the shell), although it doesn't implicitly reflect a "direction". Or what about '>>'? One could think of a process' pipeline as a stream (I think that would make sense if one considers the concepts of Source, Sink and Filter from Boost.Iostreams).
Except that writing to an ostream like this is not very intuitable: istream >> filter >> ostream I am used to writing to an ostream using operator<< not operator>> and expect the syntax above to extract something into "filter", then extract _something_else_ to "ostream", NOT the output of filter. I think '|' is the best choice: istream | filter | ostream This is consistent with shell syntax and not inconsistent with IOStreams. (that would be a valid shell command if "istream" == "cat < infile" and "ostream" == "cat > outfile" You don't need to duplicate the < and > shell redirections IMHO, they are simply adornments. "cat < infile" is identical to "cat infile" and "cat > outfile" could be written "cat -o outfile" if cat had a -o switch. jon