[greggyb]

I understand how a lisp implementation would work here to require only the single operator (I'm assuming a fairly simple macro).

Would it not be possible to do something similar in another functional language to take a <pipe function> and apply it sequentially to a list of function calls?

[emillon]

There are no semantic problems with this, but typing will get in the way: you can express it fairly easily if all the functions have the same type (such as Int -> Int): actually it's just 'foldr ($)'. But it is difficult to type a list of functions such as each member's return value has the same type as the next one's parameter (symbolically, [an-1 -> an, ..., a1 -> a2, a0 -> a1]). It's easier to refer to the composition of such functions, which is why you would see it as 'h . g . f'.