use Perl

That having been said, I noted something recently. A while back I wrote some specific functions that essentially were wrappers for open() with various modes. My sanity check kicked in after I wrote a couple, and I realized that I didn't really need to do it -- open was really as clean as it got without sacrificing functionality. Having an append() and readfile() and closefile() etc. just cluttered up namespace.

This was some time back. Recently, I've had to parse an entire directory, for which I discovered opendir. It has occurred to me that opendir does not have the niceties that open has -- filehandles don't work with while without a little extra arcana, stripping out the . and .. files and skipping unreadables without dying and a few other things. These little typing exercises from the Ram weren't upsetting until I started the second thing that included them, and the magic word "refactoring" floated to the top of my mind.

"Gee. Couldn't I build a little wrapper to these, something that returns a list of files in the directory minus the . and .. at the very least? Wouldn't that help with readability, since you're adding all this quickly-typed but line-noise-reminiscent code to handle some special situations and whatnot? I mean, since you're adding stuff to warn on unreadables and all that, you might as well go whole hog, make functions that return 1 for a completely well-read directory and return a list of files that didn't work for an error..."

The voice is still going. I think it's a good idea, and I'm going to attempt a refactor tomorrow to help me write the guts of my GUI (since the GUI is going to require essentially the same directory-opening activity as the command-line filter system.)