One of the greatest things about perl is the community -- in fact, probably the greatest, IMHO. A big part of that is readily available, friendly help with problems.

One of the best things any of us can do to advocate perl is to maintain that atmosphere.

I believe that homework questions that are reasonably specific in nature and show that the poster is attempting to learn are not only acceptable, but valuable to other monks as well.*

If we had a more positive view of well-phrased homework questions, it might also encourage people to be more straightforward about it, instead of trying to disguise their intentions.

Even the lazy-type questions deserve to be handled with some decorum and respect for the poster. To echo the comments of many others, everyone is a beginner at some point. I have asked my share of dumb questions here or in c.l.p.misc, and I am sure I will ask more in the future.

In my experience, even when the response is a variant of RTFM, it has always been both useful and respectful. I believe that is something that the perl community should take to heart as one of its great strengths.

</ajdelore>

* For instance, I had no idea that calling <> in list context would read the whole file into an array of lines until I read this node yesterday. I always thought you had to explicitly iterate over <> or else set $/ = undef and slurp the whole file into a string.