TITLE

Wildcards for multiple module imports

VERSION

  Maintainer: Peter Bevan <peter@scalarmonkey.com>
  Date: 8 Aug 2000
  Mailing List: perl6-language@perl.org
  Number: 62
  Version: 1
  Status: Developing

ABSTRACT

It occurs that being able to include modules via wildcards for entire packages would be a desirable feature. Just as in Java, related packages could then be loaded implicitley without the need for specifying each one in turn. The LWP and Net packages, are a good example.

DESCRIPTION

A directory in the perl library is intended to encapsulate modules which have relevance to each other (again the Net package is a good example). Given that this is the case (and given extensive expirience) it is apparent that there are many situations in which onw would wish to load the entire group.

As things stand this is not a possibility (without reading the dir stuctures and loading each file dynamicly - which isn't a great idea).

As a side point this may push module developers into even better co-operative working enviroments (i.e. they will need to work much more closely together in order to tie up their respective modules)

IMPLEMENTATION

The option to load modules thus:

use Foo::* [The '*' character isn't very pleasant, any sugestions??] or use Foo::Bar::* [An alternate Foo::, has been sugested] etc

Also, having thought about it, it occurs that the ability to opt-out of such a scheme is desirable. This could be acheived by eigther setting some kind of global identifier within the module to signal it's "community-mindedness" or possibly a new naming convention (.pm for modules which have opted-out and .pmc for instance, for those which have not). It may even be possible to set a flag of somekind in the module packlist. I guess thats up to the internals developers to decide...

REFERENCES