The danger of this is that it implies things that aren't true - namely that the subroutines are defined in the lines of code after this, and they aren't.

For example, these two chunks of code do entirely opposite things: 
use CGI qw(:all);

print hr, "Hello world", br, "How's life?", hr;

[download]
eval 'use CGI qw(:all)';

print hr, "Hello world", br, "How's life?", hr;

[download]
In fact, the latter won't compile under use strict, because we're using the hr and br barewords!

Now, if the if statement were inside a BEGIN, that'd be better, but then most likely the variable would need to be set earlier, ever regressing into nothingness. It's turtles all the way down!

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

In reply to RE: RE: loading a module only if you need it by merlyn
in thread loading a module only if you need it by skazat

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.