The dog’s balls pattern is a thing. I didn’t name it.

This is the pattern:

mtcars |>
    transform(kmL = mpg / 2.35) |>
    ( \(df)
      lm(kmL ~ hp, data = df)
    )()

Copy pasta from this tweet.

Noisy syntax involving parentheses, including a werid empty pair hanging out in the breeze at the end. The easiest thing for beginners anyone to forget or accidentally unbalance.

So rather than reinvent the wheel, let’s take a quick look at how other programming languages with pipes have solved this issue.

Well there’s the Hack pipe and it uses a $$ placeholder to allow the user to set the position without making a lambda:

$x = vec[2,1,3]
  |> Vec\map($$, $a ==> $a * $a)
  |> Vec\sort($$);

But Hack? That’s a bit obscure.

What about Julia? Something more data sciencey and close to home. Well Julia uses a @pipe macro to, you guessed it, let the user deploy a placeholder to the arg position to be piped to:

@pipe a |> addX(_,6) + divY(4,_) |> println # 10.0

This macro theme is repeated in other languages. Checkout Clojure, it has so many pipes: -> pipe to first, ->> pipe to last, and ofcourse, as-> pipe to placeholder.

Okay so I am just cherry-picking examples. But the placeholder or placeholder/macro combination is a solution with precedent to the problem of how to pipe into an argument other than the first.

So let’s think now about R. We don’t have macros. Game over? No. R’s famed syntax malleability via lazy evaluation and syntax tree operations is how we get that kind of stuff done.

To fix Dog’s balls we’d be looking at some kind of function that manipulates the syntax tree. That is to say, it can turn:

a |> b(x, _) into a |> b(x, a)

Clearly, it needs to know about the symbols a and b(x, _) so it has to be an infix operator. Something like:

a %|>% b(x, _)

Where the %|>% function’s job is to rewrite the syntax tree by replacing any _ in the tree on its right-hand side, with the thing on its left-hand side. Easy done? Well, there is a recursion issue. It needs to rewrite:

a %|>% b(x, _) %|>% c(y, _) into c(y, b(x, a)) but details details.

I do think we can probably shave down some characters…. maybe drop the |? Still keeps the forward idea going.

And how do we feel about _… a bit Pearl-ish… maybe ? hmmm no that doesn’t inspire confidence… . ahhhh brief but firm - I like it. Putting it all together we have our new pipe:

a %>% b(x, .)

Now, I already know what you’re going to say, “This is not a pipe”.