Haha! Thanks to my Google-fu, I have found an SO answer that may interest you. Basically, the answer is going against the “don’t overload operators unless you really have to” argument by overloading the bitwise-OR operator to provide shell-like piping, resulting in Python code like this:
for i in xrange(2,100) | sieve(2) | sieve(3) | sieve(5) | sieve(7):
print i
What it does, conceptually, is pipe the list of numbers from 2 to 99 (xrange(2, 100)) through a sieve function that removes multiples of a given number (first 2, then 3, then 5, then 7). This is the start of a prime-number generator, though generating prime numbers this way is a rather bad idea. But we can do more:
for i in xrange(2,100) | strify() | startswith(5):
print i
This generates the range, then converts all of them from numbers to strings, and then filters out anything that doesn’t start with 5.
The post shows a basic parent class that allows you to overload two methods, map and filter, to describe the behavior of your pipe. So strify() uses the map method to convert everything to a string, while sieve() uses the filter method to weed out things that aren’t multiples of the number.
It’s quite clever, though perhaps that means it’s not very Pythonic, but it demonstrates what you are after and a technique to get it that can probably be applied easily to other languages.