Jay Savage wrote: [snip]
But think a little bit about the convoluted namespace you created to get that function in there. Think also about this: why have you put this code into a module? So you can reuse it, presumably. Or at least that's the assumption I'm working with. Maybe you're even going to share your module with other people. Now let's say I maintain Digest::MD5, and tomorrow, I decide that the function isn't going to be called 'md5_base64' anymore, because I got sick of typing it. From now on it's going to be 'md5_64'. You now have to go through and fix your module to make it export the new function name. Then you have to go through every program that uses the module, and change every occurance of 'md5_base64'--thank god for regex!
That would effect more than just this single module. The purpose of APIs is that you can communicate by only needing to know the name of the function, not the code it does. By changing the name of the function, you change the API, meaning that anything that ever used that function will cease to function properly. Why use a regular expression when you know *exactly* what you are getting? Which is better $abc eq 'abc' or $abc =~ m/abc/? Not to mention that regex wouldn't help if the function name were changed to my_hash_function.
[snip]
--jay
perl -p -i.old -e 's/old_func\((.*)\)/new_func($1)/g' *pl
To keep this on topic of the OP, there is still no need for either way with the way I was able to do it with import() which is better yet and makes this new argument moot and pointless.
Please die thread ;p
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