How will global perlish variables disappear?

[gabriele renzi]

Hi gurus and nubys,

matz said more than once that the perlish global variables like
$/ or $: are going away in future releases.

I wonder if is there already a decision, what they will become?
I mean, it's easy to think that $DEFAULT_INPUT may become a class
variable of IO but what about $1..$n or $: ?

More, would it be possible to have some kind of backward compat via an
external module ?

 

[Robert Klemme]

Hi gurus and nubys,

No guru, just speculating...

matz said more than once that the perlish global variables like
$/ or $: are going away in future releases.

I wonder if is there already a decision, what they will become?
I mean, it's easy to think that $DEFAULT_INPUT may become a class
variable of IO but what about $1..$n or $: ?

For $1..$n there is MatchData which is IHMO a better abstraction. Btw,
I'd prefer to have a MatchData instance in situations like

"foooo".scan(/.(.)/) {|m| ... }

("m" is an Array here)

$: is IMHO a class constant of Kernel.

More, would it be possible to have some kind of backward compat via an
external module ?

Not if global variables are removed altogether.

robert