There was some discussion at TPC4 that typeglobs could be expunged from
P6. If this is likely, it would free up a type-defining punctuation
character (*).
Could this be used for filehandles? I have often thought that filehandles
were handicapped unnecesarily by looking like barewords. Granted, these
days you can put one in a scalar, but then visually, you can't tell that
it's a filehandle except by context, and type prefixes are designed to
obviate that problem.
Using * as a type prefix for filehandles seems natural (it's been the most
common use anyway in statements like "local *FH") and I don't see how it
breaks backward compatibility any more than would happen if typeglobs get
the axe.
--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
