I prefer the first. At a glance, I can see that it's every element of the sequence, and that they're extremely regular. When you list them all explictly, I have to stare at each one to see if it's one higher than the previous and doesn't have some typo.

"Capture regularities in code, irregularities in data", is the koan of the senior programmer. You've bucked that for a microoptimization.

But yes, I understand your maintenance concern. Suppose besides "arg1".."arg5" (which is another way you could have written that and didn't, which made me wonder), you eventually might have had "arg19" and "gee37". You could have written the original loop as: 

for (map("arg$_", 1..5)) {
  ..
}

[download]
And then the maintenance person can add: 
for (map("arg$_", 1..5, 19), "gee37") {
  ..
}

[download]
That'd probably be the most flexible, and the most clear.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

In reply to •Re: On Foreach Loops and Maintainability by merlyn
in thread On Foreach Loops and Maintainability by rob_au

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