begin  quoting Lan Barnes as of Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 12:31:47PM -0700:
> 
[snip]
> Hmm ... centuries ago I took a C/Unix programming course in which we
> simulated (actually, recreated) the pipe function by overwriting the stdin
> of a process with the stdout of another. Are you saying there might be
> languages based on this?

That's pretty much how you implement pipes in a shell. Create a pipe,
fork, fork, close stdin, dup to stdin, close stdout, dup to stdout,
exec, exec.

> Because I would think that any scripting language (like Tcl) that allows
> new commands to be added using C could easily develop a couple of commands
> that would do that (and undo it afterward).

You pretty much need to spawn off processes to do this, or write your
command to read/write from/to streams that you passed in to the
function.

>                                             But because I have no feel for
> how it would be used in programming (other than what could be done by
> opening a pipe file or calling a pipe in a shell), I'd probably botch it.

Java makes it easy to compose streams -- you can basically wrap a stream
with another stream that transforms it in some way, and then chain
together the transformations.  Smalltalk is even more flexible (you
iterate through a list by reading from it as if it were a stream).

I'm sure that many other languages have similiar features.

> Or am I just not getting this?

I am not sure I'm getting it either. I await enlightenment.

-- 
Dangerous Phrase #7: "Piece of cake."
Stewart Stremler

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