"Inconvenience feature"

schwern on 2005-10-16T21:27:40

inconvenience feature: Any feature intended to "help" the user by bundling two commonly associated operations together but leaving no way to unbundle them rendering the primary operation less flexible. For example, a readline function which always strips newlines.

I recently ran into this with Archive::Zip::MemberRead's getline() method. The result is data loss as I cannot know if the last line in the file had a newline on it or not.