Re: Determining whether a pipeline has a (defaulted) output

/ Richard Tobin <richard@inf.ed.ac.uk> was heard to say:
| Defaulting pipeline inputs and outputs makes a big difference to
| the terseness of simple pipelines.  I'd prefer to find a solution
| that still allows that terseness.
|
| Henry suggests only allowing such defaulting on top-level pipelines:
| if you're writing a library, a bit of verboseness is less annoying.
| And the problem I described only arises for pipelines called by name.
| There's still a problem that top-level pipelines can call themselves
| recursively, but I'd like to try and find a solution before throwing
| the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm dubious of terseness as a goal, but I'm not going to fight against
it if there's a solution that solves the problems you've identified.

I suppose we could say that a pipeline which appears in a library or
which calls itself recursively may not have defaulted inputs and
outputs. That seems kindof arbitrary though, and it means that users
of growing sophistication who move their first working pipeline into a
pipeline-library will be confronted with potentially baffling errors.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | Anything more than the truth would be
http://nwalsh.com/            | too much.--Robert Frost