"Luke Palmer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
> Well, the IO-objects are iterators, and you use <$iter> to iterate. It
> makes sense that <> would iterate over $*ARGV by default.
When I read this, I instinctively thought to myself: "why does this need to
be global?". And that thought progressed to: "what is the signature of a
main program?"
When you start a perl program, you don't need a "main" function, but the
program is a lexical scope from which you return. its just the "sub"
declaration that is implicit:
sub main::_([EMAIL PROTECTED]) returns int {...}
or some such thing. Is this really the best signature we could use? Given
that we want a ref to the array to be the default topic, perhaps the
signature is:
class main is program {
has @.ARGV is rw;
has %.ENV is rw;
method _() returns int { ... }
}
We could then paste any number of program attributes into that class: %.ENV,
$.STDIN, $.STDOUT, etc. Thing like $*IN would just be aliases to those
attributes: @*ARGV := .ARGV; etc.
If I stretch my imagination a little, I could even see user-code creating
other instances of program you use in place of functions like system and
exec.
sub qw(Str $exe) { program.new( $exe ) as string }
OK, maybe that's not quite what you'd want, but I you get the picture (I
hope).
Dave.
