On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 10:20:28AM +0200, Yuval Kogman wrote: : How should this stuff be expressed? 'use less' is cute, but i don't : think it really gets there.
It's mostly there as a placeholder for all the "true pragmas" that can be ignored if you don't understand them, an idea I originally stole from Ada. We sort of got away from that notion in Perl 5, but it'd be nice if we could have some way of recognizing hints that can be ignored if unrecognized. That was the original intent of the uppercase/lowercase distinction in "use", but we lost the distinction somewhere along the way. At least we've gotten rid of "use overload". Maybe we can reclaim the lowercase modules for futureproofed hinting, or establish some other convention. I agree that "use less" ain't it. : Perhaps this interface, or it's principals should also allow : similarly controlled debugging/tracing. Usually when trying to look : inside a big app, you are only concerned about a specific part. I : think this is very analogeous to optimization hints: : : sometimes you want to override it form the command line : : sometimes you only want it to apply to calls from a certain : place : : sometimes you want to enable it from within the code it applies : to, and sometimes outside of it : : you often want a volume knob for this behavior : : you want several instances of usage to not conflict : : I'd like to see what the design team can do about this. Welcome to the design team. Have at it. :-) This problem seems to be a generalization of the earlier discussion about turning warnings on or off in lexical vs dynamic scopes. Larry
