First case: yes, the program runs fine. And while I agree that the program does not contain bugs *now*, not declaring variables can become a habit and someday create a BIG problem in a large program (trivial mistake: misspelling), which could've been avoided with "use strict".

It's all about personal preferences, after all. I prefer to use the abilities of Perl to force myself to write flawless programs that do not have syntax errors, do not produce warnings, and do not have (hopefully) logical errors. I came to that point of view when I was coding Basic and then reinforced when dealing with badly written VB programs.

Warnings, as I've mentioned, are a different story. I do not turn them on until I've dealt with errors since I believe that getting rid of warnings is a stage when I "polish" the program to make it not only working, but "flawlessly working".

If you prefer to have flexibility at expense of possibility to introduce hard-to-find errors that could've been avoided in the first place, that's your choice. I'm just providing the grounds/reasons for mine.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.