Interesting little history of the |> operator

Archeological Semiotics: The Birth of the Pipeline Symbol, 1994

I thought some on the forum might find this email chain on how |> was decided upon to be interesting.

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Interestingly OCaml still refers to it as the “reverse application operator”, so I guess F# gets the blame for the “pipeline” name.

What I find surprising is that the exchange doesn’t make any reference to the UNIX pipe operator | after stumbling on |>.

Aside: Douglas McIlroy conceived the notion of the pipe which Ken Thompson added to Version 3 Unix in 1973. The | character wasn’t associated with it until Version 4 Unix in 1978.

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