in reply to Re: Re: Re: Worst thing you ever made with Perl
in thread Worst thing you ever made with Perl

Putting a space in the middle of a variable is just a wee bit different from indenting lines within a function.

Is it? 

%foo = (bar => "xyzzy")
print $foo{bar};       # xyzzy
print $foo {bar};      # xyzzy  (!!!)
print "-$foo{bar}-";   # -xyzzy-
print "-$foo {bar}-";  # - {bar}-

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Juerd # { site => 'juerd.nl', plp_site => 'plp.juerd.nl', do_not_use => 'spamtrap' }

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Re: Worst thing you ever made with Perl
by jonadab (Parson) on Oct 01, 2003 at 15:31 UTC
    Putting a space in the middle of a variable is just a wee bit different from indenting lines within a function.
    Is it?

    Yes, absolutely, without qualification, it is fundamentally different. Indenting everything within a block is a strongly-recommended best practice in good coding style, because it greatly enhances clarity. Being told that I shouldn't do that with POD is as far as I'm concerned a good enough reason in itself not to use POD (within blocks -- which is where I wanted to put the information in question), because I would have to adopt an unclear coding style in order to do so. Now I understand why people who use POD stick it all in big huge chunks, rather than interspersing it through the code like comments -- because fundamentally it's not designed to be interspersed the way comments can be. (I had been led to believe otherwise.)

    Putting whitespace in variable names (as, $foo {bar}) is something I would do in an obfuscation, to make the code *less* clear. If it alters the meaning, so what? It isn't something I'd normally expect good code to ever do, so at worst it's a very minor gotcha. 

    $;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/

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      Putting whitespace in variable names (as, $foo {bar}) is something I would do in an obfuscation, to make the code *less* clear.

      I don't see any whitespace in a variable name. I see whitespace between a variable name and an 'operator' though. Putting whitespace between '$foo' and '{bar}' is what I do all the time. It serves exactly the same purpose as putting whitespace around the addition operator, and between words in a sentence. Becauselongblobsoftextwithoutspacesinbetweenishardertoread.

      Abigail

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        This was in the context of interpolation. Operators aren't interpolated, generally speaking. (Yeah, I know, methods are interpolated in Perl6... Perl6 is different in a number of ways (some of which I look forward to, but I digress).) In Perl5, $foo{bar} is a scalar value -- hence, the scalar sigil. If you were referring to the hash value foo, it would be spelled %foo, and then anything that followed would be an operator. (Again, I know a lot of this changes in Perl6... but there are other corresponding changes surrounding it that give a consistency Perl5 wouldn't have if $foo were to refer to %foo in the way you seem to imply.) As it stands, $foo{bar} is a single scalar value. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. 

        $;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/

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