RE (tilly) 3: Perl Safety

Don't call them. Raise a stink. Really.

In the meantime write wrappers for these functions, in the wrappers call, check the implicit variables, and return them. Then when the code can be fixed, less has to be changed. If you can, localize the variables in your wrapper.

And "use strict" to be sure you have everything lexically scoped.

But people like that are a hazard to your code base, nothing more and nothing less.

Comment on RE (tilly) 3: Perl Safety

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RE: RE (tilly) 3: Perl Safety by gaspodethewonderdog (Monk) on Aug 25, 2000 at 23:40 UTC
Actually I have managed to seperate myself from most of the grubby stuff by putting my routines into their own module(s). I've been pushing my employer pretty hard to let me reimplement a lot of this stuff (even so far as to replace all these hacked database (read flat text files) to real databases), yet right now the reality is I have to deal with all the corporate overhead... beauracracy and all... I've had implied to me that fixing these things would be a bad idea (lots of reimplementation???) but more than likely it is somebody wanting to be lazy. For now I'm just trying to get one thing fixed at a time... however there is no reason to not be paranoid. I have had a few too many problems in the last year with people changing code bases under me without warning to not be worried and as such raise it as a concern. Having people rely on your code and when it breaks not knowing where the problem is just stinks. Especially when you had nothing to do with the breaking.	[reply]

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RE: RE (tilly) 3: Perl Safety
by gaspodethewonderdog (Monk) on Aug 25, 2000 at 23:40 UTC

For now I'm just trying to get one thing fixed at a time... however there is no reason to *not* be paranoid. I have had a few too many problems in the last year with people changing code bases under me without warning to not be worried and as such raise it as a concern.

Having people rely on your code and when it breaks not knowing where the problem is just stinks. Especially when you had nothing to do with the breaking.

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