in reply to Useful addition to Perl?

I don't think a proposal to add an option to Perl as you propose will make any chance, unless you've shown it's in demand. How to prove demand? Make a module that gives you this behaviour. It shouldn't be too hard to make a module with a modified glob, that does a recursive expand.

As for the recursive behaviour of @ARGV, be aware that @ARGV (or rather <ARGV>) is already highly magical. Ever tried passing 'who |' as an argument? Do you think the added complexity to <ARGV> outweights the benefits?

Abigail

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Re: Re: Useful addition to Perl?
by tilly (Archbishop) on Mar 05, 2004 at 01:04 UTC
    I don't understand why you claim that @ARGV is highly magical.

    The example that you gave describes what I would expect considering the fact that the entries in @ARGV are passed straight to open, and that is magical. Too magical. I fully agree with the thread that started at Two-arg open() considered dangerous.

    As for the recursive behaviour, yes I think that the benefits of an optional recursive preprocessing of @ARGV outweighs the costs. Of course you couldn't rely on that if you were being paranoid, because of the security problems with trusting Perl's open. But we both knew that anyways.

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Re: Re: Useful addition to Perl?
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 04, 2004 at 23:55 UTC

    Umm.. this is Perl, we throw everything in that appears even slightly useful and say "TIMTOWTDI." Evaluating features on the basis of consistancy is not the Perl way, it's the Python way.

    This conversation ended by the goodwin-wall law.

[reply]
      Umm.. this is Perl, we throw everything in that appears even slightly useful and say "TIMTOWTDI."
      Who is we? Are you a perl5 porter? Ever read that list? Abigail has a point (just because you use perl, doesn't mean you know anything how decisions are made).
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