My point was really that using named variables is usually more clear (to me at least) than using no variable, relying in the default of either $_ or @_ in the function.

This depends highly on the situation. You later say that your coding style is "situational," so I don't understand why you'd make a sweeping generalization like this. There are many cases where relying on $_ greatly enhances readability.

@_ is a completely different matter, because -- as blazar says -- it's not just a "default" that you can avoid using. You use it to get subroutine parameters, and that's all there is to it. (Unless you're talking about using @_ as the default target for split, but I certainly hope you're not.)

I've been coding Perl for 10 years now.

I don't know enough about you personally to comment on your experience, but the length of time knowing how to use something is only a rough indicator of skill level. Consider how many people have been driving a car for decades, and are still terrible at it. :-)

I initialize when I declare as a matter of habit, to avoid "uninitialized" warnings.

You might as well just turn off the "uninitialized" warnings, if that's the case. Usually I start out with my variables all uninitialized, but use an algorithm that should initialize them before I use them. If that initialization doesn't happen, then I get a warning, and I know my algorithm is funky. It can be very helpful.

I wasnt aware that line wasn't blazar-approved ... If you have a recommendation for the "newbies", you might want to actually write out some alternate code

It's not just blazar's opinion. The standard way to get iterator behavior in Perl is a while loop. A filehandle is best used as an iterator. This is common practice.

In reply to Re^4: Yet another array problem by revdiablo
in thread Yet another array problem by Angharad

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.