[erlang-questions] Must and May convention

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

On 29/09/17 5:49 AM, Vans S wrote:
>
> The 'fad' languages are very interesting testing grounds for ideas. A
> thing like the pipe operator has had many forms, but I'm not sure I'd
> call them a fad. They have existed in some form of other as:

The pipe operator is a very shallow thing indeed.
% fsi
 > (|>);;
val it : ('a -> ('a -> 'b) -> 'b) = <fun:it@REDACTED>

There's really only one function with that type:
'T'(A, F) -> F(A).
It's the T combinator
(http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/cus/combinator/birds.html)
written as an infix operator.

The equivalent in Haskell is not monads but
flip ($), and the normal Haskell equivalent of
    a |> f |> g |> h
is just
    h $ g $ f $ a
or even
    (h . g . f) a

There really isn't anything special about |> in a
functional language.  The only real issue is whether
the syntax adapts well to user-defined combinators,
and Erlang syntax doesn't.  That's purely a syntax
issue and says nothing about the soundness of the basic
model.