[Rd] New pipe operator

[Gabriel Becker]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 at 10:35 AM Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck using gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 at 12:54 PM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > An advantage of the current implementation is that it's simple and easy
> > to understand.  Once you make it a user-modifiable binary operator,
> > things will go kind of nuts.
> >
> > For example, I doubt if there are many users of magrittr's pipe who
> > really understand its subtleties, e.g. the example in Luke's paper where
> > 1 %>% c(., 2) gives c(1,2), but 1 %>% c(c(.), 2) gives c(1, 1, 2). (And
> > I could add 1 %>% c(c(.), 2, .) and  1 %>% c(c(.), 2, . + 2)  to
> > continue the fun.)
>
> The rule is not so complicated.  Automatic insertion is done unless
> you use dot in the top level function or if you surround it with
> {...}.  It really makes sense since if you use gsub(pattern,
> replacement, .) then surely you don't want automatic insertion and if
> you surround it with { ... } then you are explicitly telling it not
> to.
>
>
This is the point that I believe Duncan is trying to make (and I agree
with) though. Consider the question "after piping LHS into RHS, what is the
first argument in the resulting call?".

For the base pipe, the answer, completely unambiguously, is LHS. Full stop.
That is easy to understand.

For magrittr the answer is "Well, it depends, let me see your RHS
expression, is it wrapped in braces? If not, are you using the placeholder?
If you are using the placeholder, where/how are you using it?".

That is inherently much more complicated. Yes, you understand how the
magrittr pipe behaves, and yes you find it very convenient. Thats great,
but neither of those things equate to simplicity. They just mean that you,
a very experienced pipe user, carry around the cognitive load necessary to
have that understanding.

More concretely, the current base pipe  is extremely simple, all it does i


   1. Figure out RHS exprssion call
         1. If RHS is an anonymous function declaration, construct a call
         to it for a new RHS
      2. Insert LHS expression into first argument position of RHS call
      expression


Done. And (1) would be removed if anonymous functions required () after
them, which would be consistent, and even simpler, but kind of annoying. I
think it is a good compromise which is guaranteed to be safe because
anonymous functions are something the parser recognizes.  Either way, if
that was dropped, what |> does would be *entirely* trivial to understand
and explain. With a single sentence.

I had the equivalent pseudocode for the magrittr pipe written out here but
honestly felt like overkill that came across as mean, so I'll leave that as
an exercise to interested readers.

~G

> Assuming the existence of placeholders a possible simplification would
> be to NOT do automatic insertion if { ... } is used and to use it
> otherwise although personally having used it for some time I find the
> existing rule in magrittr generally does what you want.
>
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