Design principles

pipeR is designed to make R code easier to read, write, and maintain using pipeline operations. Its design and future development follow the following principles:

1. Define a set of syntax rather than symbols
2. Syntax should be simple, clear and intuitive
3. Give users full control of the piping behavior

More specifically, pipeR

• Defines intuitive syntax rather than a collection of symbols to improve code readability.
• Uses different syntax for each feature to reduce ambiguity.

pipeR avoids introducing too many symbols because symbols are too small to distinguish in a glimpse. Suppose pipeR defines a set of symbols, each of which plays a different role, one probably cannot quickly find out the input value of each line at first look. In this case, to understand how one line works one must refer to the operator in end of the previous line, or maybe several lines above. This makes the code even harder to read. That is why pipeR carefully designs syntax rather than introduces new operators for a feature.

In fact, with old functions deprecated, pipeR v0.5 only has one operator %>>% and one function Pipe() for users but provides a number of features that are useful and flexible in building pipelines.