A few weeks ago, my father and I were discussing Perl. (He is a professional programmer of about twenty-five years; the last seven or so have been spent building Visual FoxPro apps for a major financial institution.) I ended up explaining Perl's module loading mechanism to him; he agreed that the concept was elegant, but thought that calling the subroutine "import" was a bad idea, because it kept users from creating a sub with that name for other purposes.
It occurred to me that Perl has a "syntax" in place for dealing with this problem--subroutines with special purposes have names in all-caps. (Besides all the blocks like BEGIN and END, consider DESTROY. I also seem to remember that there's an all-caps object initializing method in Perl 6.) I suggest that this mechanism be extended to import, making it IMPORT instead. This would return to the module writer's domain a common English word that is often used in computer contexts, which is probably a Good Thing.
Of course, this entire post assumes that import isn't going away entirely.
--Brent "Dax" Royal-Gordon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Perl and Parrot hacker
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
