is there a reson or particular situation where it's better to use a bare word?

_________
broquaint

Perhaps you are familiar with the saying: "You can't teach an old dog new tricks"?

I (and I'm sure many others) learned to use bareword filehandles. If I remember to use a variable one time, chances are the next time I'll revert back to a bareword.

If any monks can think of a situation where a bareword filehandle is indeed preferable to a lexical filehandle then please reply below.

When it is already open for you such as ARGV, ARGVOUT, and the STD* filehandles.

Other than that, you got me... but I'm an old dog like Mr. Muskrat and tend to use them, at least in my main programs. (I manage to avoid them in modules though.)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

One more reason TO use the variable method:

Better error messages, as you can get the filename in messages using the following:



my $f = "/etc/hosts";
open($f, $f);
readit($f);

sub readit
{
    my $h = shift;
    print while(<$h>);
    warn;
}
[download]

The result:
last line of output is:

Warning: something's wrong at ./t25.pl line 11, </etc/hosts> line 12.
[download]



--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com