> Pipeline is the main tool for function composition. To make pipelines suitable for complex data manipulation, Elvish extends them to be able to carry structured data (as opposed to just bytes).

Well that is definitely interesting.... Are there any examples? I was writing a compiler that worked by pipelining different stages to different parts of the compiler (tokenizer -> parser -> AST) all using unix pipes. I had to stop and do something productive once I realized I couldn't pipe complex datatypes easily without a lot of effort to parse the inputs.

I'd love to see an example of this.