The points you raise are quite valid. Whether something should be fatal or not is sometimes a matter of taste - there's the "thanks for the warning but I know what I'm doing" crowd, and there's the "we should help people with their likely mistakes" crowd - so arguments about it are bound to be endless :-) Especially in this case, where an odd number of elements in a hash assignment is not a situation that Perl cannot recover from and is therefore not strictly fatal. Instead, this is more of a "the programmer likely made a mistake, but then again we don't know for 100% certain" (Perl tends to be permissive with these kinds of things), which is probably why it's a nonfatal warning. Or, looking at it from yet another angle: at least people are getting a warning in the first place, and then the user has control over their preferred level of strictness.

why "misc" category and not, say, "hash"/"odd"?!?!

That is an excellent point and worthy of a patch or at least feature request to P5P.

In reply to Re: Why is "odd number of elements in hash assignment" warning and not error? by Anonymous Monk
in thread Why is "odd number of elements in hash assignment" warning and not error? by Dallaylaen

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