Re: Please review new Perl 5 Module List

Martijn Koster (m.koster@nexor.co.uk)
Tue, 28 Feb 1995 19:03:55 +0000


> Why do we need this.  Can the length be something else than what the
> perl function length($data) returns?

I don't know how expensive length is (probably not very?)... if read()
returns it, why not pass it in?

> > What about errors that may occur during the callbacks? &content
> > could return an result code of some sort, or even an error message.
> > Should WWW::Response change it's internal result code if &content
> > failed?
> 
> Don't think so.  Returning undef on failure and 1 otherwise (like many
> perl functions do) should be sufficient.  You should be able to take a
> look at $! if you get undef.

I hope so. We simply don't know what sort of things may go wrong in
future protocols... Imagine a protocol where you can get a
notification of a cancellation half-way through retrieving a file.
The function will know what happened, and can recover gracefully. But
how does the user get to know?
 
> One thought that strikes me is why we don't just provide a perl
> interface to the CERN libwww code.  Does anybody know the internals of
> libwww well enough to comment on how difficult this would be?

Not me :-)

-- Martijn
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