Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ksr!chuck
From: chuck@ksr.UUCP (Chuck Shavit)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: filename glob
Message-ID: <624@ksr.UUCP>
Date: 15 Mar 90 19:22:04 GMT
Distribution: comp.lang.perl
Organization: Kendall Square Research Corp.
Lines: 20


I find the syntax of filename globbing rather odd.  If I am not
mistaken, this is the only case where $VAR and ${VAR} have different
semantics (except, of course, in strings like "${VAR}xx").  I bet that
if you are not familiar with the internals, you will not be able to
predict what the literal string will do in

    while ( <"*.c"> ) {...}


My suggestion is to modify the syntax.  One way is to replace perl's
filename glob syntax with a function call, e.g.

    for (glob("*.c")) {...}
    
Another possibility is to modify the globbing syntax to <<$var>>, where
$var is anything that evaluates to a string.
    

Chuck Shavit