FWIW I wrote a related blog post:

"Shell Pipelines Support Vectorized, Point-Free, and Imperative Style"

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/15.html

I'm also writing a blog post right now that uses this real instance of point-free style:

    count-nul() {
        od -A n -t x1 | grep -o '00' | wc -l  
    }
    # usage: count-nul < myfile.bin

The issue is that grep can't find NUL bytes, because argv is NUL-terminated. So you have to convert to hex, grep, and then count.