On Fri, 5 Jul 2002, Trey Harris wrote:
: Did I hear somewhere that paragraph mode (i.e., C<$/ = ''>) is going away?
: I can't find it in my archives, so maybe it was one of my feverish Perl 6
: dreams (of which I've had too many lately, after spending a few days in
: training with Damian ;-) but I think I heard it said by someone with
: authority at some point.
Paragraph mode is not going away--it's merely going elsewhere. :-)
: If so, what's the rationale? Another case of "you can't do it right
: internationally, so better not to do it at all"?
No, it's simply that using a global variable to control something
that should be a filehandle attribute is the wrong way to go about it.
: I'm just looking at the huge number of stanza-based files and
: system-utility output sysadmins deal with every day using C<$/ = ''>, and
: thinking "yeah, I could just write a grammar, but it's just a simple regex
: match in paragraph mode..."
No problem, you'll just say something like:
$fh = open $filename, ":para";
for <$fh> -> $para { ... }
Eventually the Perl 5 folks will get around to implementing such
user-oriented layers in Perl 5, but at the moment they're still working
on the encoding-oriented layers, which is fine.
Likewise, you won't undefine $/ to slurp a file. You just put in
a :slurp layer:
$fh = open $filename, ":slurp";
$text = <$fh>;
Of course, that's kind of silly. Really, when you want the entire
file, you should just use the slurp function:
$text = slurp $filename;
That's particularly handy on standard input:
$text = slurp $*IN;
It's kind of klunky to bind a mode to an existing handle:
mode $*IN: ":slurp";
$text = <$*IN>;
I suppose that slurp with no arguments should slurp from @ARGS.
Like Perl 5, it should probably slurp one file per, er, slurp,
rather than automatically concatenating all the files.
for slurp -> $file { ... }
Larry
