Re: RFC 100 (v1) Embed full URI support into Perl

On Tue, 15 Aug 2000, Nathan Wiger wrote:

> With URI support, you still have to contort a little, but not as much.
> Here's some better examples from an email I sent earlier:
> 
>    $fo = open "file://c/docs/personal";
> 
>    # Unix = /docs/personal    # here, 'c' becomes '/'
>    # Mac  = :docs:personal    # here, 'c' becomes ':'
>    # Win  = c:\docs\personal

Really?  I would have expected that to be "/c/docs/personal" under
UNIX.  Strangely enough Netscape on my Linux box thought I wanted to
contact a server called "c".  Lynx thought I wanted to contact an FTP
server.

So, what's so portable about file:// URLs again?  How do they magically
know that //c/ means / on UNIX?  What do they do with //z/?

> Although the examples are terrible at showing it (sorry), full URI
> support means more that just writing portable filenames. It means having
> Perl understand http://, ftp://, etc, etc, so that it can do something
> "really cool" with it. The upcoming v4 of RFC 14 will show how this is
> an advantage.

Have you ever used LWP?  It's already "really cool".  Should we package it
with Perl6?  Sure!  Should we try to cram its many protocols into open?  
I'm not so sure.

-sam