...but this is proof not of the ugliness of Perl, but of the ugliness of someone's mind.

Where that person wrote:

sub DoStuff {
  my ($a, $b, $c) = (-1, -2, -3);
  if ($#_ == 2) {
    ($a, $b, $c) = @_;
  } elsif ($#_ == 1) {
    ($a, $c) = @_;
  } elsif ($#_ == 0) {
    ($b) = @_;
  };

  print "A= $a\n";
  print "B= $b\n";
  print "C= $c\n";
}
[download]

We might instead write:

sub DoStuff {
  my ($a, $b, $c) = @_;
  $a = defined $a ? $a : -1;
  $b = defined $b ? $b : -2;
  $c = defined $c ? $c : -3;

  print "A= $a\n";
  print "B= $b\n";
  print "C= $c\n";
}
[download]

And while this lacks some elegance (for instance, I might want to create a loop that simply tests $_[0] and then shifts the top value into the next of my variables), I think it would be a simple improvement.

The real point is that the language allows us to be ugly. Some of choose to do so.

---v