<i>"I think there's a connection. Certainly in the early days of Unix, pipes facilitated function composition on the command line. You could take an input, perform some transformation on it, and then pipe the output into another program. (...) [The mathematical approach of function composition is] exactly what I mean. (...) I think [that mathematical formalism] was right there from the start. Doug McIlroy, at least in my book, deserves the credit for pipes. He thought like a mathematician and I think he had this connection right from the start. I think of the Unix command line as a prototypical functional language."</i><p>-- from an interview with Alfred Aho, one of the creators of AWK<p><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=yB1WwURwBUQC&#38;lpg=PT120&#38;ots=-BUH9ErkdB&#38;pg=PT120#v=onepage&#38;q=&#38;f=false" rel="nofollow">http://books.google.com/books?id=yB1WwURwBUQC&#38;lpg=PT120&...</a>