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in reply to Re^4: When should a wheel be reinvented
in thread When should a wheel be reinvented

Interesting...

Honestly, I'd really rather not see yet another implementation of directory traversal in perl. What I think would be the ideal is to have just one implementation (let it stay File::Find, everyone already knows it!), but have that implementation be usable with each of these types of interface:

  1. callbacks
  2. declaratively (by that I mean: my @files = File::Find::find(...); or something similar)
  3. iterator

Presently, File::Find provides 1, directly. File::Find::Rule and its ilk provide 2 (as a wrapper around File::Find... which is great, because that means no one has to replicate the directory traversal code for that). The thing that's missing is a good iterator interface, and, again, that can't be built as a wrapper around File::Find.

So of course, the best possible thing (in my opinion) would be if someone rewrote File::Find so that it (internally) had an iterator interface:

my $finder = File::Find->new($opts, @dirs); while (my $file = $finder->next) { # do stuff }
And then, finally, to change the old familiar File::Find::find(...) to be implemented as a simple wrapper around File::Find's iterator interface:
# simplified a lot, but basically sub find { my ($opts, @dirs) = @_; $opts = wrap_wanted ($opts); my $wanted = $opts->{wanted}; my $finder = File::Find->new($opts, @dirs); while (my $file = $finder->next) { local $_ = $file; local ... # etcetera &$wanted } }
So you'd get:

Of course, I feel bad demanding this, without volunteering to do it, but honestly, it would create legal complications if I were to do so (I've got one of those contracts where my employer owns everything I do... at least for the moment, but I've been promised that that will change at least somewhat by the end of july). But I still think that the "most best" approach is clear enough that it's worth setting down (even if I'm not going to go off and implement it myself).

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