<cut>
>Perl is *not* fun when it supplies nothing by default, the way C does(n't).
<cut>
>If you want a language that can do nothing by itself, fine, but don't
>call it Perl. Given these:
<cut>
I agree!
Removing some of the things mentioned would turn Perl into an environment
well suited for computer science projects, but a hard sell as a tool to get
a job done. Let me take a look in my c:\\work directory for a second....
Just as I thought most (80%) are less than 1k in size. All but one huge 5k
program are 2k or less. Yet these small (20 lines or less) programs have
been credited with saving hundreds of man hours of administrative effort.
While it would not be a HUGE effort for me to add five to ten lines of "use
X" and insert some "X::" into these scripts, what do I gain by that change?
If there is an argument to take math functions etc out of the core to
improve speed (and I doubt it is a good one) then there would need to come
up with a "magic" autoloader to allow the environment to continue to remain
terse and powerful. I wish there was just a way to say "use everything" and
have the modules loaded when encountered (i.e. WIN32::ADMINMISC ).
>From a purist standpoint the first two functions to go should be split() and
chomp(). They should be moved to a special string library. Then regex stuff
should become functions in another. Pretty soon we have a nice clean butter
knife of an environment instead of a "Swiss Army Chainsaw".
