I'm not sure if this is a Meditation or a SoPW, but it's certainly a confession of sorts.... (monks, confession, oh never mind...)

I have never knowingly run a perl program with the -d switch (correction, I've run programs with the -d switch - but more out of curiosity rather than with useful intent).

I suspect that this might be a fairly common confession - particularly for self-taught coders and/or those without a background in C, C++, whatever...

Instead, my code tends to look like:

my $debug = 1;

....

print "Current record is: $recno and used flag is $used\n" if $debug;
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So... is this the sort of thing that I should be using the perl debugger for? And, if so, how? And are there times where "$debug" is a better approach?

AFAIK this site doesn't have much in the way of a debugger tutorial, so give me some good answers and I'll try and compile the best advice into one.

map{$a=1-$_/10;map{$d=$a;$e=$b=$_/20-2;map{($d,$e)=(2*$d*$e+$a,$e**2
-$d**2+$b);$c=$d**2+$e**2>4?$d=8:_}1..50;print$c}0..59;print$/}0..20
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