You are absolutely right about the protoypes. D'oh. It's not the first time I've made a fool of myself.

Prototyping built-ins with modules seems to be the thing to do in Perl. Look at the history of say(). Building your proposed changes and then advocating them seems to be the way to go.

Update: Uh, ambiguous use of the word "protoyping" on my part. In paragraph one, I meant the Perl language feature. In paragraph two, I meant the act of making a test version of something.

I agree with you about prototypes (the perl feature). They are so useful that in 8 years of using Perl, I've used them in actual working code 2 times. (Unless you count my newbie error of trying to prototype everything--then the count gets a bit higher. :) )

If you want to advocate for this sort of built-in, build a library version of it that acts as much like you want the built in to work, and push it. If it becomes popular enough, the P5P/Perl6 crowd may decide that the deliciousness of it is irresistible and incorporate it. We now have a switch and also 'say'.