Dan Sugalski wrote:
> >Languages like C and
> >Pascal even go so far as to make I/O an "option" that you have to
> >#include (or whatever, depending on the language; Pascal makes you
> >specify it explicitly in some way I don't quite remember), and they
> >seem to do fine.
>
> For some pretty pathetic definitions of "fine". I could rant about C's
> brain-dead stdio library for quite a while, but it's not relevant here.
Can't argue with you, I guess.
> I like perl's smart built-in IO just fine, thanks. :) Don't mind making it
> better, but I do mind making it optional.
I/O perhaps wasn't a very good suggestion. There's lots of other
candidates, though, such as the aforementioned getservbyname() and
associated functions, etc.
I would like to see some nice, seamless way for programmers who
prefer O-O I/O filehandles to feel fine and for programmers who don't
want O-O in their I/O (does that sound like a TV commercial?) to feel fine.
I suppose the suggestion I made about stripping out every system
call is more along the lines of the microperl idea.
How about this: perhaps we should compile a list of system calls
that _should_ remain in the core language. I think it will probably
be very small.
J. David
