Chaining a sequence of generators

I often gravitate towards solutions using a series of chained generators, in the style of David Beazley's 'Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers.'

This results in the outer level of my code calling one generator after another, terminating in something that consumes the rows, pulling data one row at a time through each of the generators:

inputRows = read()
parsedRows = parse(inputRows)
processedRows = process(parsedRows)
outputRows = format_(processedRows)
output(outputRows)

where each called function except the last is actually a generator, e.g:

def parse(rows):
    for row in rows:
        yield int(row)

This is great. But my itch is that the top level code above is a bit wordy, given that what it does is so simple. The reader has to check each temporary variable quite carefully to be sure it's doing the right thing.

Fowler's 'Refactoring' describes circumstances when it's good to remove intermediate variables, which results in:

output( format_( process( parse( read() ) ) ) )

This is certainly less wordy, and expresses what's happening very directly, but it annoys some of my colleagues that the called functions are listed in reverse order from what one might intuitively expect.

I've had this idea in my head to create a decorator for generators which allows one to chain them in an intuitive order, possibly using some unconventional notation such as:

read() | parse | process | format_ | output

where 'parse', et al, are now decorated with '@chainable' or somesuch, which returns an instance of a class that stores the wrapped generator, and overrides __or__ to do its magic. Maybe 'read' doesn't need to be invoked manually there at the start of the chain. I haven't really thought this through.

Luckily, before embarking on that, I realised today I've been over-complicating the whole thing. There's no need for decorators, nor for the cute '|' syntax. I just need a plain old function:

def link(source, *transforms):
    args = source
    for transform in transforms:
        args = transform(args)
    return args

Update: This code has been improved thanks to suggestions in the comments from Daniel Pope (eliminate the 'first' variable) and Xtian (take an iterable rather than a callable for the source.)

This assumes the first item passed to link is an iterable, and each subsequent item is a generator that takes the result of the item before.

If the final item in the sequence passed to 'link' is a generator, then this returns a generator which is the composite of all the ones passed in:

for item in link(read(), parse, process, format_):
    print item

Or if the final item passed to 'link' is a regular function, which consumes the preceding generators, then calling 'link' will invoke the generators, i.e. the following is the same as the above 'for' loop:

link(read(), parse, process, format_, output)

There's some rough edges, such as determining what to do if different generators require other args. Presumably 'partial' could help here. But in general, 'link' only needs to be written once, and I'm liking it.