I think it is important to remember that sometimes it is difficult to know what to look up in the documentation.

I'll give an example from my own experience. When I first used PerlMonks, I was very new to Perl (5 days or so) and I was trying to search for all the positions of a regrex in a string (original post here). I knew about index, but had not yet come across the pos function in my reading.
Sure, I would have read about it eventually as I learned the language, but I was learning the language by writing this program. Maybe I was over-reaching, but I was trying to solve a problem. I couldn't look up a function I didn't know the name of, so I posted a simple question.

The two excellent responses by Russ and btrott were just what I needed. They gave me the answer (the pos function), a little about the function, and even some sample code. From there, I was able to look up more on the pos function and continue programming and learning perl without delay.

Without knowing about pos, it would have taken me a while to discover it on my own. There are definitely questions that are too basic, but (aside from homework questions) they really don't hurt anything.

If you feel a question is too simple, just don't answer it. That might let someone a little less experienced in the language answer it and help someone out.

Again, my thanks to Russ and btrott, who helped me with what was a simple question.

In reply to RE: Are there questions to basic? by Dogg
in thread Are there questions to basic? by OzzyOsbourne

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