Another thought on files

I'm proposing a new approach to the formalization of knowledge about programming constructs. Instead of building a new module, I'm proposing the definition of heuristics for the use of the old ones. OK, sometimes your application justifies the creation of a new module (rather often, granted), but sometimes, given a script order, you either don't have the luxury of installing a module, or you just don't want to involve that kind of overhead.

In such a case, you want to be able to write a script that uses existing Perl infrastructure (say) but still manages to deal with sticky cases like UTF-8 BOM markers because the actual specific files in use for the case include them.

So the trajectory I went through: write the naive code, discover BOM markers, work out a way to deal with them, find one file in the list that didn't have BOM markers and write the appropriate conditional code to handle both cases - that trajectory is something that is amenable to automation.

Well. It's not really very amenable to automation right now. That's the point of semantic programming. That's what I want to automate. It didn't require a whole lot of human insight, just some techniques I've learned over the years and some basic logic. I don't think it's AI-complete; it's just one more corner to break off the brick, and it's the corner I have my eye on.