I personally don't see the lack of use strict; as a problem at all. TMTOWTDI, and if strict was supposed to be used by everyone no matter what, it'd be built into perl itself and thus be mandatory instead of being a pragma that you can choose to use or not.

And apart from that, being able to do get things done quickly and not having to worry about doing things the "right way" is one of the merits of Perl, I think. The XML modules are fine, and a maintainable program would probably end up using them instead, too, but I am glad that it is possible to just write something that works as fast as possible as a starting point.

Sorry if I'm in a bitchy mood today. :)

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mowgli