to append to that idea, the actual regex should be
m/^(?:administrator|etc|yadda|blah)/;
since you are not using $1, dont make perl go through the trouble of storing it to return it. the ?: says look for this but dont hang on to it.
MMMMM... Chocolaty Perl Goodness..... | [reply]
[d/l] |
I thought about putting that in but decided against it.
I mean, unless the code is being used millions of times per second, does it really matter? When I was a beginner programmer, I constantly fretted that my code wasn't as efficient as it could be. Now I think I'm beginning to figure out that wasting my mental energy over these kinds of issues is a lot worse than wasting a half dozen or so computer clock cycles. For the kinds of jobs Perl is good for, and unless you are stuck with some a 286 microprocessor, it probably isn't worth the trouble of writing super-efficient code---especially when it makes the code more difficult for newbies to understand.
$PM = "Perl Monk's";
$MCF = "Most Clueless Friar Abbot Bishop Pontiff";
$nysus = $PM . $MCF;
Click here if you love Perl Monks
| [reply] |
While you are correct, I like to keep to what I think are best practices in my regular coding.
For me this means
attempting to maintain consistancy of style across a codebase
utilizing idioms as much as possible (unless using another mechanism provides better readability)
attempting to do as much I/O as possible at once to minimize waiting for a resource to become available again
scoping my variables as tightly as possible, and if they are needed elseware returning a reference to the data as opposed to the data
So from my angle of best practices, its a natural extension to only request the pieces of data I am actually going to do something with. If I only need the month from localtime I do
my $mth = ( split(/\s+/, localtime) )[1];
I dont need the other values, so why waste the RAM and cycles building the lvalue list only to use a single element? Granted here its slightly contrived, but in more complex code, only building what I need, and returning only what is essential tends to turn out a more maintainer friendly codebase in my personal experience.
Update: I don't know that I was clear in how I make the jump to only capture the data I'm going to use, based on the list above. I try to keep the codebase trim, as the more keystrokes the easier for a bug to creep in (yay strict, warnings, boo logic errors :P). So from there, its an extension to keep the number of variables down. I guess I should also add judicious use of comments to my best practices list. I comment blocks, and particularly interesting lines (ala, splitting some value and pulling elements, I will generally to something like # 0: foo 1: bar 2: baz).
MMMMM... Chocolaty Perl Goodness..... | [reply]
[d/l] |