Plumbers, chains, and famous painters: The (updated) history of the pipe operator in R

Note: This post is an updated version of another I published in 2014, in a previous version of this site. Our story starts as many other R related stories… in stackoverflow. On January 17th, 2012, an anonymous user “user4” asked the following question: How can you implement F#’s forward pipe operator in R? The operator makes it possible to easily chain a sequence of calculations. For example, when you have an input data and want to call functions foo and bar in sequence, you can write: