"Craig A. Berry" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 10/01/2007 09:21:18 PM:
> We could consider an option to have all updates to %ENV done as
> user-mode logical names where the automatic destruction on image
> run-down would more or less correspond to what happens on other
> platforms. Can't say it's high on my priority list, though.
Unfortunately, I know of a large amount of perl scripting for
VMS that relies on the persistance of $ENV{'FOO'} assignments
to last outside the perl.exe image wind down and the wrappering
DCL expects to find useful information in the f$trlnm("FOO")
return value. Such scripts would silently break if user mode
became the default and we upgraded perl.
When such unix-isms creep their way toward vmsperl I have often
asked "Why not write a VMS::*bar* module to allow folks to
try it out *bar* first optionally?". In this case I will not
only re-raise that question but point out that as recently
as this afternoon when I went looking for VMS::Logical on
CPAN I did not find it there. So how about adding
VMS::Logical to the core perl distribution just like
was done with VMS::Stdio many years ago? The
functionality of a well maintained VMS::Logical
extension (read;write;user-,exec-,super-modes, etc.)
is so often requested that I'd think it would make a
valuable contribution to the core irrespective of
possible future changes to the %ENV hash handling.
Peter Prymmer
