Note that Dominus grapples with this same question in Why it's stupid to `use a variable as a variable name' (Part 1). He knows that symbolic refs are bad, so when a question comes up about them, should he say so and have people jump on him (just answer the question!), or should he just go on and give the answer and have a completely seperate group of people jump on him (you know this is bad, so why didn't you say so?!!)?

The answer can usually be determined by the context of the question. You may pick up hints that the question came from an experianced coder, either by things said in the post or past experiance. If so, it's probably best to just answer it and let them deal with any consequences.

OTOH, imagine a SoPW like this:

I NEED HELP BUGGING CGI. I TRY GETTING PARAMS FROM CGI 
require CGI 'standard'
for $i (Vars()) {
    $$i = param($i);
}

[download]
BUT IT DONT WORK NEED HELP PLEASE THANKS

If you answer that question without showing why its bad, be prepared to meet my clue-by-four :)

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

In reply to Re: Answering questions and questioning questions by hardburn
in thread Answering questions and questioning questions by talexb

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