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in reply to Re: Re: Two-arg open() considered dangerous
in thread Two-arg open() considered dangerous

I have to say that I disagree with you here chip - The concept that the language designers should limit an interface to shield even only potentially unfriendly arguments, particularly where such arguments may be perfectly valid (as described by merlyn above), is in itself flawed. Perl has always been described as "providing enough rope to hang yourself with" - I would much rather take those steps of good engineering than sacrifice any power within the underlying language interface.

 

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Re: Re: Re: Re: Two-arg open() considered dangerous
by chip (Curate) on Dec 13, 2001 at 04:39 UTC
    Well of course there's a balance, rob. But I'm rather tired of excuses for poor design decisions that make writing robust software more difficult without any real gains.

    Why couldn't three-arg open have been in Perl from the start of its being a full language, i.e. 3.0 or so? It should have been.

        -- Chip Salzenberg, Free-Floating Agent of Chaos

      For the most part, I think this is probably simply a result of language evolution - I'm sure that even once Perl 6 is released, we'll still be finding syntactical anomalies that could better be rewritten and indeed most likely will be.

      Don't get me wrong, this statement isn't meant to dissuade your argument, but rather support it - I see great value in your comments and its such comments that are required to drive changes. However, as with all aspects of Perl, its "perfection in progress" ;-)

       

      perl -e 's&&rob@cowsnet.com.au&&&split/[@.]/&&s&.com.&_&&&print'

        Well, I wouldn't call it a "result" of language evolution; it's more an impetus for evolution. :-)

        That said: I certainly wouldn't want to prevent Perl from being released just because of little warts like two-arg open. "Better is better than perfect." So I think we're in agreement on what to do about warts: Fix 'em and get on with life.

            -- Chip Salzenberg, Free-Floating Agent of Chaos