[tyingq]

Maybe the thinking was that Perl's STDIN, STDOUT, STDERR, came from c's (well, stdio.h's) stdin, stdout, stderr?

Which then inspired the bad idea of expanding on that?

[ksherlock]

It's more from sed/awk/shell I suppose.

eg, open FH, "<filename"

vs FILE *fh = fopen("filename","r")

[tyingq]

For the <,> and variations, sure. Though IO::File has been there a long time and looks a lot more like your C example. IO::Handle also.

Supports, for example:

$fh = IO::File->new("filename", "r");

Or, as with C, things like O_WRONLY|O_APPEND in place of "r".