On Jan 4, 2005, at 2:47 PM, Bruce J Keeler wrote:
I've always felt that this one should have a lowercase name, since it's rather pragma-ish. Are pragmas allowed outside of the core Perl distribution? Maybe it should be submitted as a core pragma, actually. It's a really lightweight beast, and very useful. Would certainly get my vote.
I agree that it should be lowercased; yes, there are modules on CPAN that look like pragmas (such as only). I personally would prefer, however, that the name tell me that it's doing something more than loading a class; "class" and "module" don't do that. Here are some other options:
* alias (too close to "Aliased"?) * nickname * moniker * pseudonym * aka * anonym * handle (not a file handle, though, might be confusing) * label * term * shortcut
I kind of like "aka", actually. But nickname, moniker, and shortcut are all good, too.
There is Package::Alias[1]. Does the same thing, but I haven't used it.
I like the idea of it being a pragma; 'aka' seems kinda perlish.
It'd be nice if this was supported in perl, so it would be possible to alias entire namespaces
use aka 'Apache2::Apache::' as 'Apache::'; # ;-)
Which would all all modules in the first namespace to be addressed as if they were in the second, including munging %INC so it does the right thing.
1. <http://search.cpan.org/dist/Package-Alias/>
