Golf has no value in production code. Your "elegant" line is one that I would fail in a code review, and I think that most reasonable people would likewise.

On the home-grown csv_split. I detect the following bugs and various issues:

  1. You are way too fond of putting multiple lines on one. Hitting return is cheap, and makes code easier to scan.
  2. Walking through a string with s/(.)// is inefficient. (Walking the string is O(n*n).) Use m/(.)/g instead - that is what it is for. You can rewrite your check for "" with: /\G"/cg (see perlop). This makes for a O(n) algorithm. (Unless $` or $' were used anywhere in the program. In which case split might turn out faster.)
  3. A toggle is better written as $quoted = !$quoted; That obviously and unambiguously toggles. To verify what $quoted = 1 - $quoted; did I had to to scan the code to see if $quoted was set anywhere else. Why make the maintainer do that work when a clearer alternative exists?
  4. Your code will not handle returns embedded in a quoted field. If having the bug is OK in your application, document that limitation with a comment. Else fix.
  5. Speaking of comments, anyone who doesn't understand the CSV format reasonably well is likely to wonder whether you made some serious mistakes. A brief English description of the format would make sense.
And one overall comment. Coding is about getting the job done efficiently, while leaving yourself able to do so again in the future. It isn't about proving that you are l33t. It isn't about using as few lines as possible. It is about being effective.

Therefore don't think of style as something that you have to squeeze through an external code review. Think of it as something that you enforce with an internal code review because good style lessens how much work you have to do before you can productively work on your old scripts.

In reply to Re: Code for elegance, code for clarity by tilly
in thread Code for elegance, code for clarity by delirium

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