Re: 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?

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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Re: Worst thing you ever made with Perl by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Oct 01, 2003 at 16:08 UTC
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	[reply]
Re: Worst thing you ever made with Perl by jonadab (Parson) on Oct 01, 2003 at 17:02 UTC
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$/` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Worst thing you ever made with Perl by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Oct 01, 2003 at 19:27 UTC
I've never disputed that '$foo {bar}' is a single scalar value. But so are '$_ x 5' and '-M $0'. Just the fact that expressions result in single scalar values, doesn't mean one can't sprinkle whitespace between tokens to make things more readable. Abigail	[reply]