Re: Why is "odd number of elements in hash assignment" warning and not error?

The points you raise are quite valid. Whether something should be fatal or not is sometimes a matter of taste - there's the "thanks for the warning but I know what I'm doing" crowd, and there's the "we should help people with their likely mistakes" crowd - so arguments about it are bound to be endless :-) Especially in this case, where an odd number of elements in a hash assignment is not a situation that Perl cannot recover from and is therefore not strictly fatal. Instead, this is more of a "the programmer likely made a mistake, but then again we don't know for 100% certain" (Perl tends to be permissive with these kinds of things), which is probably why it's a nonfatal warning. Or, looking at it from yet another angle: at least people are getting a warning in the first place, and then the user has control over their preferred level of strictness.

why "misc" category and not, say, "hash"/"odd"?!?!

That is an excellent point and worthy of a patch or at least feature request to P5P.

Comment on Re: Why is "odd number of elements in hash assignment" warning and not error?

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Re^2: Why is "odd number of elements in hash assignment" warning and not error? by LanX (Saint) on Feb 18, 2015 at 18:13 UTC
> at least people are getting a warning in the first place, yep, as a side note: "devision by 0" is a "silent Not_a_Number" in some languages like JS I.e. not a fatal stop of execution! Not any exception which could be activated or caught! Just returning "NaN" from calculation. > there's the "thanks for the warning but I know what I'm doing" crowd, And we had recently a discussion about people complaining that undefined values raise far too many warnings. ;-) > > why "misc" category and not, say, "hash"/"odd"?!?! > That is an excellent point most likely the set of warnings was expanded gradually over time... update > worthy of a patch or at least feature request to P5P. well I'm more concerned that obvious compile time errors aren't reported `perl -we 'sub tst {%h=\%h}'` (reusing %h to silence "only used one") Cheers Rolf PS: Je suis Charlie!	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Why is "odd number of elements in hash assignment" warning and not error? by Anonymous Monk on Feb 18, 2015 at 18:38 UTC
Just to throw in another side note :-) And we had recently a discussion about people complaining that undefined values raise far too many warnings. ;-) Even here, I think giving the programmer control is the best option: When I'm generating stuff from templates, I often use `no warnings 'uninitialized';` because I want my `undef`s to silently become `""`, but when I'm handling other data, e.g. from a database where there is a difference between `NULL` and `0.0`, I prefer having the warnings (and once in a while I may even fatalize them).	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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