It's certainly cool and easy :) The reason it's easy is that it fits in very well with how *nix thinks of files - as an ordered bag of bytes.

Reading a file from disk involves pulling blocks of data off the wires and putting them in a memory buffer. If we just forget about the disk and write data into the buffer directly, what we get is just like a file, as far as the user is concerned.

Getting perl to make use of that involved adding syntax to tell open that you want the new trick. Using a reference to a string was a brilliant choice, imo. It is compact, simple, and provides a natural way to set and recover the data.

None of the above is informed by the actual implementation in PerlIO, just the general properties of *nix systems.

After Compline,
Zaxo

In reply to Re: WHY does 'open' have a new trick? by Zaxo
in thread WHY does 'open' have a new trick? by John M. Dlugosz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.