On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 09:31:33AM -0800, Larry Wall wrote:
: I guess the only real argument against unifying is that neither of
:
: for [EMAIL PROTECTED] {...}
:
: or
:
: for @foo {...}
:
: indicate destructive readout. Which probably says that *
: is the wrong operator to use for that, which undoes our pretty
:
: for * {...}
This is all muddled thinking anyway, since [EMAIL PROTECTED] would read the
arguments,
not the lines from the files contained in the arguments. Despite the
history of ARGV in Perl 5, I wonder if it's a mistake to overload @ARGS
and $ARGS to mean two different things.
On the other hand, it'd be nice if we could end up with something
readable like:
for .lines {...}
where the implicit invocant of Main knows how to iterate magically through
the lines of @ARGS. I suppose that implicit invocant could be named $ARGS.
The magic still consists of making a bunch of filenames look like a single
filehandle. A method like .lines could work either on a filehandle, or
on a string representing a filename, or an array of filehandles, or an
array of strings representing filenames.
We also potentially get things like
for .slurp {...}
for .paragraphs {...}
But we have to be careful with things like
for "foo".bytes {...}
since "foo".bytes returns 3, not the bytes of file "foo". So there
needs to be some intermediate method to say that you mean io. Taking a
page fro IO::All, I suppose we could have "foo".io.bytes or some such.
But $ARGS would already be an io object, so people presumably wouldn't
have to always say
for .io.lines {...}
As I've said before, I like the idea of IO:All, except for the
overloading of < and >. Perhaps we could go with <== and ==> instead.
Larry
