Question

Simple question:

I want to write a function like say.

But it had one bad feature: a filehandle.

       say FILEHANDLE LIST
       say FILEHANDLE
       say LIST
       say 

How to declare it? Is it possible?

P.S:
I find an example with myopen(*;$), but it’s not the same thing.
P.P.S:
I need this function in old Perl versions, because it is annoying to write print "\n"

Thanks!

Answer 1

Perl6::Say does just that.

It cleverly emulates the say FILEHANDLE TEXT syntax by taking advantage of Perl’s usually very annoying indirect method call syntax. It loads IO::Handle turning every filehandle into an object and creates IO::Handle->say. Now say FILEHANDLE TEXT is actually FILEHANDLE->say(TEXT).

It does have caveats. From the docs…

Use it just like print (except that it only supports the indirect
object syntax when the stream is a bareword). That is, assuming
the relevant filehandles are open for output, you can use any of these:

say @data;
say FH @data;
FH->say(@data);
*FH->say(@data);
(\*FH)->say(@data);
say $fh, @data;
$fh->say(@data);

but not any of these:

say {FH} @data;
say {*FH} @data;
say {\*FH} @data;
say $fh @data;
say {$fh} @data;

UPDATE: To make this even simpler, I have just uploaded Say::Compat which loads either Perl6::Say or use feature 'say' depending on your version of Perl.

That’s the best you’re likely to get without playing with Devel::Declare.