Sorry if this is not the correct place to ask.

I use Ruby, and am a complete Perl newbie. One of the coolest thing in Ruby is that you can "reopen" any class, including builtin ones and add methods to it. This is very powerful. For example, by just require-ing the 'yaml' library, suddenly all objects, be it a string, hash, symbol, has a to_yaml() method to represent itself as YAML. Or, you can redefine methods and make builtin classes behave differently (or crazily).

Is Perl5 able to do the equivalent of this, reopening classes and redefining core functions like open(), die()? What is the syntax for that? Also, how about Perl6?

In reply to Reopening builtin classes, redefining builtin functions? by Anonymous Monk

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