Alias builtins?

m.att has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Is there any way to alias builtins in the same spirit as you would alias a sub/variable?

*foo = *bar;

IE: *readlines = *readline;

Possibly some CORE:: magic?

Am I missing the forest for the trees?

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Re: Alias builtins? by Tanktalus (Canon) on Feb 16, 2005 at 01:13 UTC
After playing with too many permutations to put in here... the closest I came up with is: `perl -e 'sub foo { CORE::log(shift) }; print foo(123),$/;'` [download] In other words, you need to create &readlines as a sub around CORE::readline. Note a few things: The built-ins have proper prototyping. If you pass in @_ when it's expecting a scalar (such as CORE::log above), you're going to be getting funny results (I kept getting 0 ... because log(1) == 0). I had to change it from `CORE::log(@_)` to `CORE::log(shift)` to get it to work. Of course, `CORE::log($_[0])` would work as well. It's not quite the same thing as aliasing. We're not mapping $foo to $CORE::log, or %foo to %CORE::log or anything like that. It's probably not as fast ... but it may be close enough. Hope that helps.	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re: Alias builtins?
by Tanktalus (Canon) on Feb 16, 2005 at 01:13 UTC

After playing with too many permutations to put in here... the closest I came up with is:

perl -e 'sub foo { CORE::log(shift) }; print foo(123),$/;'
[download]

The built-ins have proper prototyping. If you pass in @_ when it's expecting a scalar (such as CORE::log above), you're going to be getting funny results (I kept getting 0 ... because log(1) == 0). I had to change it from CORE::log(@_) to CORE::log(shift) to get it to work. Of course, CORE::log($_[0]) would work as well.
It's not quite the same thing as aliasing. We're not mapping $foo to $CORE::log, or %foo to %CORE::log or anything like that.
It's probably not as fast ... but it may be close enough.

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