Here's one of the summaries from the last of mjd's articles: 
    One of the biggest problems in all of compter
    programming is namespace management and data
    hiding. When you use a symbolic reference you are
    throwing away forty years of expensive lessons from
    the School of Hard Knocks.

[download]
The fact is, a hash in my opinion buys you much larger than a "fractional" benefit w/r/t blowing away your variables. Why do you want to mix up your form values with variables in your application? What are you *gaining* by doing that?

You give the example of a variable called $name: 

    Because it's a CGI, it is very unlikely that I'll want
    to use a "$name" variable somewhere else for
    some purpose other than sucking in the "name"
    element as in my example.

[download]
Sorry, but $name isn't a very good example of an uncommon variable name. :) That's the sort of thing that could very easily get you in trouble if your programs start getting larger, or if you start doing development in a team environment, etc.

The basic point here is: you're buying yourself nothing, save typing a couple of characters, by not using a hash. Even if you view using a hash as providing only "fractionally" more security, why not use it?

In reply to RE: Re: Variable variable names by btrott
in thread Variable variable names by cei

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