You are making an artificial separation where none exists.

we will see about that (grin)

But the distinction is simple: conceptual elements belong in separate data elements or in a single element with straightforward access. The DBI dsn string has several conceptual elements which are not in separate data elemnets. And access is not straightforward - had a hash reference been used, access would be more straightforward, with no loss in API quality.

But like I said in the opening post of this thread: Typically people either know this and dont need to be told or they dont know it and dont care :) So it's almost like screaming at a wall.

But your comments about URLs are well-taken. I thought about that this morning when I woke up. And in a sense, you could consider DSNs as a form of URL. In fact, SQLAlchemy uses URLs instead of DSNs

Rather than something to be "avoided", DBI's use of a string for the data source name is the sign of a well-though through, flexible interface. One that recognises that you cannot fit the world into labelled boxes, and that in many situations, there is no purpose in trying.

I dont agree: it requires more parsing to decide which DBD to dispatch to this way.

You should be celebrating the vision and skill of those authors for designing an interface so flexible it can accommodate future developments without requiring constant re-writes as time passes and uses evolve. Not decrying them.

$dsn as a hash reference would have been just as flexible and much finer grained. And it would not suffer from a case of compound data. And the code to decide which DBD to dispatch to would've been more succinct. And I would not have had to write DBIx::DBH in order to work with Rose::DB and DBI interchangeably.

The Rose::DB API has finer granularity and does not suffer from the compound data issues that the DBI one does: connection info from Rose::DB can be converted into DBI connection info in a simple fashion, vice versa not so.

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