(NB Post author)

Kinda. It's close to that, except in order to make it do that we had to actually make the functions return special types so it's more equivalent to something like

SELECT device_id, apply(sum, apply(abs, apply(delta, apply(sort, timevector(ts, val))))))

Where each of the items in there is an instance of our special "PipelineElement" type, which defines the function it's applying.

Does that make any sense at all? Not sure if I'm explaining this well...