Modern practice is to make variables as local as possible. Creating a routine to initialize global variables is totally contrary to modern practice. As much as possible, functions/routines should only manipulate data and variables they recieve as arguments. As well, initializing an array to an empty array is pointless, as is initializing a strting to an empty string, or an integer to zero ... they are all created witht he value undef, which in many situations has the effect you assign explicitly. Admittedly, in certain odd situations, it becomes essential to assign a value to avoid pointless warning messages, but assigning routine intial values is a C practice, made obsolete by C++, Java and Perl.

As far as your printarg is concerned, it looks fine to me. However (You knew there was a however coming, didn't you?) the instructions only say to number the args, no comment about starting at zero or one or 17425. I would use that to my advantage to use the automatic numbering system of an array: 

for my $idx ( 0..$#_ ) { # $#_ is index of last element,
                         # scalar @_ is number of elements
    print "$idx  $_[$idx]\n";
# or to start numbering at one
    print $idx+1 . " $_[$idx]\n"
}

[download]

I was quick to learn $#array, took me a lot longer to learn 'scalar @array .... both are useful.

</code>

--
TTTATCGGTCGTTATATAGATGTTTGCA

In reply to Re: Functions in Perl by TomDLux
in thread Functions in Perl by bluethundr

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.