Re: RFC 73 (v1) All Perl core functions should return ob

[Nathan Torkington]

Dan Sugalski writes:
> stat makes some sense. (local|gm)time makes some sense. The socket 
> functions make some sense. The message and shared memory functions make 
> some sense. Basically most of the 'advanced' functions make some sense. 
> That's the problem--they all make some sense, which is a lot of code to get 
> right for the .0 release.

stat, sockets, messaging, and the rest of the advanced stuff should
probably go to modules.  (local|gm)time belongs in the core, but
probably not as an object.

I want the core to stay useful but not complex.  If localtime returned
a hashref in scalar context, that'd be enough for me:

  $now = localtime;
  print $now->{MONTH};
  print $now->{YEAR};           # already has 1900 added onto it :-)
  print $now->{INTEGER};        # epoch seconds value

To get what is now scalar localtime, you'd say

  print localtime->{STRING};

In list context it would return a simple list of values as it does now.

RFC 48 is way too complex for my liking.  In particular it expects
Perl to be able to distinguish between assignment to array and to a
hash.

I smell a counter-RFC, or at least a mailing list on which to thrash
this out.

Nat