Re: When should a wheel be reinvented

[exussum0]

In general...

If it does what you want but can't modify it, you wrap it.
If it's a blackbox, you rewrite it if you have the resources. Blackboxes are dangerous.
If you have the source, you fix it unless it takes too long.

-s

[tilly]

You cannot generally wrap a callback interface with a looping interface unless you have continuations, co-routines, or some other similar construct. Perl does not. (Well, there is a module that adds it, but I'm not sure what issues it has. Certainly it isn't a built-in feature.)

Whether it is good for a language to have continuations is another debate, and there are top-notch people who'll argue both sides of that choice.

Regardless, Perl 6 will have continuations.

[etcshadow]

Here, here. See this node for some further discussion (which, in fact, also happens to mention File::Find and it's callback-based interface).

[tilly]

If you're motivated, I'd suggest trying to find some of Dominus' comments on File::Find. His opinion seems to resemble yours - File::Find works well except that the API can be very inconvenient. IIRC his book (which should be coming out really soon...) on higher-order Perl implements an iterator-based equivalent to File::Find.