Hey @larryq 
These pipes and such are actually just a regular part of YAML.
https://yaml-multiline.info/
The | indicates that everything indented below should be treated as a string literal, preserving those new lines, which you can imagine, would be crucial to executing our code properly.
If we had only a single line of code to run, we wouldnt need any symbol at all.
The > symbol takes all of the content indented and collapses it to a single line string.
I actually personally like to only use the |, but orbs are open source and we haven’t been that strict about style.