Speaking from the "peanut gallery" as just some guy who uses perl a lot...
I agree with the idea of cleaning up the builtin functions so that they're
obvious to the widest possible audience. However, I don't know that what's
"obvious" is that clearcut -- I mostly work on Unix, so I expect "unlink()"
to work (and, in fact, I'm sitting here drawing a blank on how you remove a
reference to a file on Win32 other than by using "_unlink()" or "remove()").
;)
How about considering the idea of "synonyms", though? Is it unreasonable
to have "unlink()" and "fdelete()" (or whatever it is on Win32) mean the
same thing?
Or maybe it would be better to rephrase the question as "Who is Perl for?"
Dirk
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Mathews [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2000 10:01 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: What is Perl?
>
> As far as Perl being an offspring of Unix I think that's great if it is in
> meant **in spirit**. But any opportunity for Perl6 can make things more
> understandable to the average programmer vs. the average Unix user should
> be
> taken advantage of. The "unlink()" example is a good one. Now that Perl is
> thriving on Mac and Win this sort of Unix-speak seems out-of-place. In
> spite
> of where Perl came from I don't think we should feel like we can't grow
> the
> language into something easier.
>
> --Michael
>
