## The text input-stream in the pep/nom system

 About the role of the text input-stream when using pep/nom

 Pep&Nom were designed to follow the usual Unix paradigm of *filtering* a text
 stream. That is, an input stream is provided to a Nom script which filters or
 transforms that stream and produces a text output-stream.  Large numbers of
 Unix utility programs work like this (for example: sed, grep, awk, cut, uniq,
 sort ... ) and the system has the great advantage that the filter programs can
 be *chained* together with the *pipe* "|" operator to aggregate the results.
 
 * chain filter programs together with pipes to do good things
 >> tr ' ' '\n' the.entire.web.txt | sort | uniq > all.words.txt

 This means that unix-style programs can do (in theory) *one thing well* and
 then be joined together with pipes to achieve almost anything.  (Although if
 you look at the [man] pages for tools like "sort" google:"unix sort program"
 you will soon see that this philosophy of "doing one thing well* has not been
 rigorously adhered to).

 But you **can't** do the following:

 * Sadly, not possible.
 >> cat /usr/share/dict/words | pep -f word.scramble.pss 

 Well, you may say, what's with the whole "text-filter" philosophy.
 Unfortunately the *pep* interpreter needs to use <stdin> to open and compile
 the script (a pep-assembler script compiles the input script to assembler) and
 I never bothered to work out how to fork the input stream. And I haven't lost
 much sleep over it because once you translate a script to another language
 (with the scripts in the */tr* "translation" /tr/ folder ) then this
 problem just urbandict://automagically goes away.

 * translate the html-formatter script to python and run as a file
 ------
   pep -f tr/translate.py.pss eg/text.tohtml.pss > text.tohtml.py 
   chmod o+x text.tohtml.py
   cat dissertation.on.life.txt | ./text.tohtml.py
   # the output will be your dissertation on life formatted in 
   # beautiful html (like this website) printed to <stdout> 
 ,,,,
 
 So, once nom scripts have been translated, they can be used in the 
 normal Unix text-filter way.