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=head1 TITLE
STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR should be renamed
=head1 VERSION
Maintainer: Nathan Wiger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 04 Aug 2000
Last-Modified: 12 Aug 2000
Version: 2
Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Number: 30
Status: Frozen
=head1 ABSTRACT
Consensus has been reached that filehandles (currently
barewords) will be renamed to use the leading $ type, to
make them consistent with Perl.
STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR should follow suit and be renamed
$STDIN, $STDOUT, and $STDERR.
In addition, this RFC recommends deprecating select(), since it is no
longer needed with the new fileobject approach described in RFC 14.
=head1 DESCRIPTION
Currently, filehandles are barewords, such as FILE and
PIPE. However, for Perl 6 these are planned to be renamed
to true "single-whatzitz" types (thanks Tom) and prefixed
with a $. So, the current:
print FILE "$stuff\n";
Will become something like:
print $fh "$stuff\n";
STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR need to follow suit. We should
change
print STDERR "$stuff\n";
to:
print $STDERR "$stuff\n";
This makes them consistent with other Perl variables, such
as @ARGV, %ENV, $VERSION, etc, all of which have the correct
distiguishing prefix for their type.
=head1 IMPLEMENTATION
All references to STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR will have to
be changed.
Also, select() is deprecated by this new approach and can be removed.
This code block:
$oldoutput = select($newoutput);
Can now be written simply as reassignments:
$oldoutput = $STDOUT;
$STDOUT = $filehandle;
The concept of a "currently selected filehandle" is no longer necessary.
If print is called without arguments, it will call "print $STDOUT"
($STDOUT->print) which will inherit whatever print exists in whatever
object $STDOUT references.
=head1 CHANGES
This RFC was frozen at version 2 on 12 Aug 2000.
=head1 REFERENCES
RFC14: Modify open() to support FileObjects and Extensibility
