Re: End-of-scope actions: do/eval duality.

[abigail]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 10:04:51AM -0300, Branden wrote:
> Bart Lateur wrote:
> >
> > No, it's a misunderstanding between you and Tony. The "do" your
> > reference is talking about, is of the form
> >
> > do FILE
> >
> > where file is a string containing a filename, while Tony is talking
> > about the
> >
> > do BLOCK
> >
> > form. do FILE behaves just like eval() (except it reads its data from a
> > source file), while do BLOCK doesn't. Neither.
> >
> 
> Why `do FILE' behaves like eval, if there's eval to do it? Isn't this a
> little too much not-orthogonal? Why don't we require `eval { do FILE }' to
> have the behaviour of not dying and setting $@ ?


And that would gains us what exactly?

As the Perl man page says, do FILE is like

    scalar eval `cat FILE`;

If you take out the eval, you get:

    scalar `cat FILE`;

which is pretty pointless.


I find a "let's require some extra hoops and red tape" not very-Perl like.
Perl is there for the programmer; not the other way around.


Abigail