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Re^4: When should a wheel be reinvented

by tilly (Archbishop)
on Jul 01, 2004 at 02:26 UTC ( [id://370966]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re^3: When should a wheel be reinvented
in thread When should a wheel be reinvented

If you're motivated, I'd suggest trying to find some of Dominus' comments on File::Find. His opinion seems to resemble yours - File::Find works well except that the API can be very inconvenient. IIRC his book (which should be coming out really soon...) on higher-order Perl implements an iterator-based equivalent to File::Find.

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Re^5: When should a wheel be reinvented
by etcshadow (Priest) on Jul 01, 2004 at 02:55 UTC
    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:
    • all the benefits of each type of interface
    • the directory traversal written (and optimized and maintained, etc) only once
    • nothing gets broken (all we've done is to refactor and to add new functionality)

    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).

    ------------ :Wq Not an editor command: Wq

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