You don't have warnings turned on, do you?

Not for the quick and dirty stuff. I use -w and strict at specific points in my development process, but usually I stick to techniques that I know to be clean.

It's probably just a personal thing, but I find that constantly using warnings is worse for me than checking my work at intervals. If I get a warning during continuous use, I just correct it and move on. My primary goal at that point is to make sure my latest piece of code produces the result that I want. When I use warnings at intervals, each warning pass is a specific test of the code's integrity. My only concern at that point is whether the code is clean, so I take the time to find ways to make sure my code stays clean in the future.

Mistakes like this one show me when I'm playing with things I shouldn't play with at all. If I need mechanical assitance to write a piece of code correctly, I probably won't be able to read it six weeks from now. And IMO, writing code that even I can't read without assistance is a problem. If I can't find a version that works, is clean, and is easy for me to remember, I write the technique off as being too tricky and look for other solutions.

In reply to Re^2: The perils of being tricky by mstone
in thread The perils of being tricky by mstone

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