As we all know, TIMTOWTDI stands for "There is more than one way to do it." That's the spirit of Perl. Of course, sometimes we (I) make dumb mistakes. For your enjoyment, I present you with some of mine.

I was working on some code today and stared at the following snippet for ten minutes trying to figure out why it wasn't working:

if ( defined $end_tag && ! defined $end_tag ) {
    # do something
}
[download]

Can you say "brain cramp" boys and girls? I knew you could.

There was another time when I inexplicably did a bitwise XOR on a code reference and couldn't figure out why the reference wasn't working.

One of my favorites (from this node) is some actual working code that was hacked by a friend who was new to Perl:

my @stuff = qw(one two three);
my $length = (@stuff.length)/10;
print $length;
[download]

Can you tell his background is Java? :)

Any other monks care to share some of their more humiliating mistakes?

Cheers,
Ovid

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