Re: Idea / preRFC - return value of require

* Branislav Zahradník <[email protected]> [2026-02-12 14:40]:
> - feature will be become handy when require will support dynamic
> loading, eg like:
> ```
>   require :module $plugin;
> ```

Actually that’s when the feature becomes unnecessary, because the only
reason I can see (and I’ll grant that it’s annoying) is that you have to
either live with duplicating the package name

    require Some::Long::Winded::Name; Some::Long::Winded::Name->value

or write something very ugly like

    require $package =~ s!::!/!gr . '.pm'; $package->value

If you could literally do

    require $package; $package->value

then that *would* be how you should do it, not by fiddling with the
`require` return value.

If we were starting over from scratch I would consider making `require`
*always* return the package name, instead of either the last expression
value (initially) or PL_sv_yes (subsequently) and that would make this
code even shorter:

    ( require $package )->value

But the fact that `require` initially returns the last expression value
cannot be changed now, which makes it useless to change what it returns
subsequently, because the code would still have to account for two cases
anyway, so there is nothing to be gained.

I think your answer is you put the ugly version in a helper function and
use that.

-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>