"Adam D. Lopresto" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Sat, 18 Sep 2004, Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote: > > The question is whether any of that needs to be core, and I'm > starting to strongly think it doesn't. I was about to say that perl > should only go trying to figure out that the file is an archive if > you pass it an appropriate command-line argument, but then I > realized that argument could well be -MPAR (or such).
If by "core" you mean language core, and if the module in question would be in the core distribution, then I can mostly go along with that (with one caveat, below). And on some platforms the Perl installer could associate certain extensions (perhaps .par) with "perl -MPAR" or whatever so that launching the thing Just Works. Since most of the point of such a mechanism would be to allow people who "just" have Perl installed to automagically run these programs-in-an-archive that include all the modules they use in their nice neat package, it would be unfortunate to require something extra to be installed to make that work. Thus, this module should go in the core distribution, along with the new and improved CPAN.pm equivalent. So in one sense I would consider this "core functionality", in the sense that it's something Perl needs to be able to do out of the box, but I can agree that it doesn't need to be in the _language_ core. Except that the module will be prepending the contents of the archive to @INC, which implies that @INC needs to be able to contain more than just directories on the system-level filesystem -- it needs to be able to contain tied "directories" that are simulated by modules, or something along those lines. The core might have to have some hooks for that. -- $;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}} split//,"[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ --";$\=$ ;-> ();print$/