Re: [MacPerl] find.pl and wanted

[Hal Wine <hal@dtor.com>]

> Now that I think of it, the interface in find.pl is just poor anyway.
> Why isn't the information that is passed in $_, $name, and $dir passed
> via the @_ argument list?

It was probably a speed consideration, as find.pl was originally
written for the automated find2perl, which always generated a
"correct" wanted function.

Pushing a new frame did take a while with Perl 4, and if you were
running (the equivalent of)
    find / ...
frame pushing could amount to several seconds of time on large file
systems.

>                           At first I was thinking that it was a
> backwards compatiblity thing, since earlier perls did not have local()

Err, Perl 4 certainly had local(), but that also takes a "long time"
to execute (it's a runtime function, as opposed to my() which is a
"compiler" directive (not really, but close enough for this
discussion)).

BTW, you have to use local with $_, not my, in Perl 5, unless you save
and restore as Adam did.