On Jan 5, 2008, at 15:37 PM, Carlos J. Hernandez wrote:
> I've just re-discovered pipes.
> Using Linux bash... stuff like `grep zip.89433 addresses.csv | sort |
> head`
> Bash pipes work very well for many problems, such as mass downloads  
> and
> data filtering.
> But they're simplest to implement on line by line text data.
> This is not a true limitation of pipe architectures.
>
> You can implement data pipes with Marshal.
> Within your class, you can define a puts method for the source's
> $stdout:
>
>>
> [...]
>
> and then the sink reads from $stdin:
>
> [...]
>
> I don't think this is implemented in a standard way anywhere in Ruby  
> (or
> any other language), but
> looks to me like a really, really good idea.

You've written the core of DRb, which is these data pipes expanded to  
a multi-process, multi-machine distributed programming tool.