Brethren,
Perl Best Practices (p 176) deprecates using an & before function calls, i.e. it prefers
snafu();
instead of
&snafu;
But all of the examples seemed like places where already-bad coding was made worse by &; not real convincing.
I continue to use the & because
- EMACS displays &function; as &function; and the color contrast helps me navigate in the code
- It's the way I learned to do it back in Perl 4; some of my code dates all the way back there, and I just keep a visual consistency to it all.
OK, the second reason is pretty lame, but the color-coding in
EMACS is helpful.
I was surprised to learn today
Be warned that Perl does not check prototypes when a subroutine call includes the & prefix.
But that seems more like a reason not to use prototypes than not to use &
Outside aesthetics, are there compelling reasons not to use the &? Compelling enough to make me go back and clean-up my already-written code that uses them?
throop
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