Re: Re: A C-like brain in a Perl-like world

Please explain "strict" to me. Perl seems anything but strict. Except when it comes to if statements, which MUST involve curly braces:

if(<cond>){%eval_true%}else{%eval_false%}
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unlike shell script or other, looser constructs that know the next line off an if is %eval_true%.

I must believe there is a good reason for this that eludes me, as I must believe that Perl is about simplicity and elegance. Yet removing curly braces and getting away with it seems like a good, intuitive thing to do to a compiler/interpreter.

Pontificate?

p.s. I would like to propose a new tag for posts and cb ... 'pseudocode' - for formatting code that is really shorthand and differentiating it from stuff between legitimate 'code' tags, which should execute in a Perl environment without errors, or with only errors specifically described in the post. What I wrote above was 'pseudocode.

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Re: Re: Re: A C-like brain in a Perl-like world by blakem (Monsignor) on Sep 28, 2001 at 11:49 UTC
In perl you can use `if` as a statement modifier... Therefore, this is perfectly valid code: `#!/usr/bin/perl -wT use strict; for my $var (0..9) { print "$var is even\n" if $var%2 == 0; # using if as a statement mo +difier }` [download] For more on use strict, please see strict.pm. -Blake	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: A C-like brain in a Perl-like world by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Sep 28, 2001 at 14:05 UTC
Forcing a BLOCK rather than an instruction after an `if` is because of a simple reason: the "dangling else". It is not apparent in which way `if $condition if $more_condition do_something() else do_other()` is to be disambiguated; many tradiditional languages arbitrarily choose to bind the `else` branch to the closest `if`, but that's not readily apparent from looking at the code - and if you want to bind the else of the first `if`, you still have to use a BLOCK around the second. So Perl forces you to use BLOCKs for clarity, but lets you append an `if` clause as a statement modifier for when you want brevity: `do_something if $condition;`. <CODE> has more functions than formatting. For pseudocode, you can use the regular <tt></tt> HTML tags.	[reply]