First, I'd like to say something about the extension. There's a tendency to have Perl programs end in '.pl'. Why is that? We type 'ls', 'mutt' and 'netscape', not 'ls.exe', 'mutt.exe' or 'netscape.exe'. Why would you want to type 'tool.pl' to execute the tool? That requires users to remember in which language a tool is written. If you later replace the tool by a better version, this time written in Python, will users be pleased if they now have to type 'tool.py'?

I use '.pl' for files I'm still working on. But as soon as they escape from their development directory, and are place in a directory that might be in someones PATH, the '.pl' gets dropped.

Names should, IMO, be descriptive. "buch.pl" might be cute, and I can guess that it's dealing with books, but not that it actually orders books. If it orders books, I'd call it "orderbooks" or "order_books". No ".pl" - the language in which it's written should not matter for the results. I don't really care if a name is long. We don't live in the early 70s anymore, nowadays we have shells with filename and command completion, and we have aliases too.

Now, for scripts I only use once, or just to test things out, I usually use 'x.pl', 'y.pl', 'z.pl', and other one letter combinations. And more than 90% of the time, they will be placed in '/tmp'.

Abigail

In reply to Re: What's in a Name? by Abigail-II
in thread What's in a Name? by schumi

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