Maintainability generally. Comprehension improves when information is in chunks that map onto an abstract model of what the process is doing. Its much easier to understand a program where dataflow only happens by argument passing and where subroutines are as minimalistic as is reasonably possible. Even when your script is pretty well unreusable its a lot easier to extend and maintain if you can ignore large chunks of the code because they are in subroutines clearly named as not being relevent to the issue at hand.

For instance lets say we have a program that scans a bunch of files and generates some stats. We could put the whole process into a single sub or not even use one, but it would be a lot easier to understand if we could just look at main and see what it does: 

sub main {
   my @files=get_files(...);
   my $stats=scan_files(\@files);
   print_stats($stats);
   return 0;
}
exit(main());

[download]

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$world=~s/war/peace/g

In reply to Re: Subroutines versus straight top to bottom scripts by demerphq
in thread Subroutines versus straight top to bottom scripts by ghenry

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