Hearing no outright derision in response to my trial balloon, here it is as
an RFC:
=head1 TITLE
Filehandles should use C<*> as a type prefix if typeglobs are eliminated.
=head1 VERSION
Maintainer: Peter Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 2 Aug 2000
Version: 1
Mailing List: perl6-language
Number: TBD
=head1 ABSTRACT
The lack of a type-defining punctuation character prefix for filehandles
makes them second-class variables in Perl. If typeglobs are eliminated in
Perl 6, the C<*> character would become available as a type prefix
character and could be used for filehandles.
=head1 DESCRIPTION
To pass filehandles around one either has to use a typeglob (C<local *FH>)
or put them in a scalar (C<my $fh = new FileHandle> or the 5.6 C<open $fh,
...>), at which point you can't tell that they're filehandles without the
right context.
There have been serious proposals to eliminate typeglobs in Perl 6. If
they get axed, the C<*> character could be reused for another datatype and
the filehandle is fortuitously closely related.
The mental jump is fairly small, since most people other than module
developers only ever saw C<*> used for filehandles anyway:
local *FH;
open (FH, ...);
This proposal would change that to
open (my *fh, ...);
=head1 IMPLEMENTATION
Backwards compatibility takes a hit unless the current filehandle syntax is
grandfathered in; I am not taking a position on whether it should
be. Since it is contingent upon typeglobs being eliminated, it won't break
any existing code that already uses typeglobs that won't be broken anyway.
Use of C<readline>s will now look like
while (<*fh>) { ...
which means that the use of the angle operator for globbing also has to
go. As if an excuse were needed.
This proposal also applies to directory handles.
=head1 REFERENCES
L<perlopentut>
--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
