On Fri, Apr 22, 2005 at 11:28:06AM +0200, Juerd wrote:
: Which brings me to the following: can open please use the same kind of
: $file, so that open $filehandle just checks $filehandle's mode and
: returns $filehandle again? That way, every library function that accepts
: a filename automatically also accepts an open filehandle, which has a
: thousand and one benefits.
You speak of "open" as if it must be a single function. We're now
living in the age of MMD, so what you're asking for is a no-brainer.
If we decided to we could even do MMD with constraints:
multi sub open ($u of Str where /^file:/, [EMAIL PROTECTED]) returns Handle
{...}
multi sub open ($u of Str where /^http:/, [EMAIL PROTECTED]) returns Handle
{...}
multi sub open ($u of Str where /^ftp:/, [EMAIL PROTECTED]) returns Handle
{...}
multi sub open ($u of Str where /^mailto:/, [EMAIL PROTECTED]) returns
Handle {...}
...
Though that would potentially be problematic if you wanted to open
a file whose name started with "http:", so we'd probably want to
give that suite of multis a different name. Call it io() maybe, if
we can unify the Handle and IO abstractions. As I've said before,
I kinda like the IO::All module, except for how it overloads < and >.
But Perl 6 has ==> and <== that can do that instead, which just happen
to be called "pipes", strange coincidence. :-)
Presumably you can write a "slurp" like this:
my $page <== io("http://www.wall.org/~larry";);
Larry
