"Andrew Shitov" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > DW> my $text is TextFile("/tmp/bar"); > DW> $text = "hello"; # writes, truncates > DW> $text ~= ", world\n"; # appends > > DW> $text.print "again\n"; # for old-times sake > > Anyhow we still need $text.flush() or $text.close() methods.
I'd argue that these are only rarely needed. Even with Perl5 filehandles, I rarely find myself needing to close a file. Garbage collection does the job adequately. The case of "flush" is more interesting. It is really used for two purposes: forcing the ram-contents to be stored on disk, so it can be recovered even id the process dies violently, is one use; ensuring a message is sent so it can be received by a consumer is the other. Even if both these roles have the same underlying implementation, we might want to abstract them differently. C<flush> is as good a name as any for the sync-to-disc usage; but the second might be better named C<send> -- and probably wouldn't be on a "text" object, anyway. I'm not sure that the details of inter-thread messaging have been decided yet, but I'd think that a common messaging paradigm would apply. Dave.
