Pipe already comes with a library of scripts that do some common text transformations for you: Base-64, ROT-13, cryptographic checksums, or hex dumps. Many of these transformations work both ways: for example, you can easily toggle between encoding and decoding Base-64, or between making a hex dump and recreating the original data from its hex representation. And through the services menu of Mac OS X you can conveniently access these functions from most applications.
Templates provide a comfortable way to jumpstart development of new scripts. They also provide a very easy way to write and test short programs in languages that need to be compiled. The C and C++ templates are discussed in detail below. Writing C code can't get any easier than that!