slurp, quine and context sensitivity

[Dan Kogai]

Folks,

This is a poetic quine (or quine-maker) in perl5.
  open myself, $0 and print <myself>;

The same thing in perl6 would be:

  my $self = open $*PROGRAM_NAME; for =$self { say }

or

  my $self = open $*PROGRAM_NAME; say for =$self;

or

  my $self = slurp $*PROGRAM_NAME; print $self;

or even

  $*PROGRAM_NAME.slurp.map:{ print };

The last example must not be

  $*PROGRAM_NAME.slurp.print;

You can check it out by running the code below;

  ##
  $*PROGRAM_NAME.slurp.print
  ##

Will print:

  ##$*PROGRAM_NAME.slurp.print##

This is because print() (and say()) expects list context and slurp()  
passes an array of chomped strings.  When it comes to autoboxing, the  
context-sensitivity of builtins may bite you like this.

With that understood, I would welcome if we have a version of slurp()  
which unconditionally returns a scalar.  Say swallow()?  Of course it  
is as easy to implement as the following;

  sub swallow($file){ my $content = slurp $file; return $content };

But like say(), I would love to have something like that as a builtin.

Or am I getting too much ruby recently?

Dan the Perl6 Addict