>many systems allow for a global/local startup file for various
>reasons. i see a potential use of this in perl but i don't see the
>specific use yet. build it they will use it.
But Perl is not an interactive shell! Can you imagine if a C
compiler allowed arbitrary amounts of text to be pre-included
into every since program? Or can you imagine if people want crt0
to have funny little hooks in it so that every a.out did wacky
arbitrary things? Why don't we have that? One answer: because for
such special-purpose tasks, there exist wrappers and existing hooks.
Another answer is that these are *programs*. This is a general-purpose
programming language. Why should you diddlemuck all possible programs
like this?
What about syntax errors?
What about security?
What about obviousness?
I entreat you to explain to me *anything* that you'd want to tweak
with this that you already can't do right now. And unless one
manages to come up with a huge class of problem areas for which it
really is the best solution to have these random evals applied to
unrelated, unforeseen programs, I'm sure that there must be a better
way. It's certainly not enough to say "maybe there is, but I don't
know such a class of problem areas."
Far, far better to arrange a wrapper or hook on the specific programs,
not all of them in existence. This kind of thing has really hosed
people, many many times. Admins spend too much time with this kind
of breakage.
Here's something else to consider: I recall Larry having *specifically*
discarded this sort of notion long ago, lost now in the mists of
antiquity. Seems like a very good justification will be needed.
--tom
