Pipelines

It's common to want to call a series of functions, passing the result of one to the next. With the regular function call syntax this can be a little difficult to read as you have to read the code from the inside out.

Gleam's pipe operator |> helps with this problem by allowing you to write code top-to-bottom.

The pipe operator takes the result of the expression on its left and passes it as an argument to the function on its right.

It will first check to see if the left-hand value could be used as the first argument to the call. For example, a |> b(1, 2) would become b(a, 1, 2). If not, it falls back to calling the result of the right-hand side as a function, e.g., b(1, 2)(a)

Gleam code is typically written with the "subject" of the function as the first argument, to make it easier to pipe. If you wish to pipe to a different position then a function capture can be used to insert the argument to the desired position.