Luke Palmer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on July 22, 2004:
Even more philosophical is "what is core?"
I believe the standard definition is "Anything I want to use goes in the core; anything everyone else wants goes wherever there's room left over." ...
So making it "go in the core" may just mean that it's on the list of recommended modules to install.
Does that mean having to "use Some::Module" to use it? If so, that partially defeats the point of having a magical DWIMy shorthand in the first place. (And if not -- then I guess it's irrelevant to most end users whether it's "really" a module or not.)
I think stringified filehandles should be "core" -- i.e. always available without having to install or include anything -- because they're exactly the sort of easy thing that Perl is supposed to make trivial. And of course, since there are plenty of cases where pretending a file is just a string won't work, Perl should also make the harder cases easy by including plain old 'open' in The Core as well. [Not] using one doesn't in any way get in the way of using the other, and they'd both be commonly used, so I think they both need to be readily available.
In fact, my general attitude towards random feature $foo is: useful to lots of people who want to use it + not harmful to people who don't = put it all in the core.
-David "at least until starting perl begins
to take longer than your coffee break" Green
