i wrote a script a while back that received some comments from the monastery. one that kinda puzzled me, was a suggestion to replace repetition within variables with another variable. for example:

my %hash = ( a => "abcd1234", b=> "abcd5678");

this is just a short pattern and two instances. in my actual code, i think i had a longer pattern (abcdefghighkl) and probably ten instances. it was suggested that i should probably do something like:

my $prefix = "abcd"; my %hash = ( a=> $prefix . "1234", b => $prefix . "5678");

do i gain anything by extracting the repetition and placing it within its own variable? this would be adding a global, which i had thought should be something to avoid.

humbly -c


In reply to Is a global variable better than repetition within variables? by c

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