This can be one of those divisive topics around the water cooler at work; and, as I'm seeing here, everyone has their own experience which leads to some similar answers and some different opinions on when to use subroutines. I'll throw my two-cents in as well.

For me, a subroutine is one of a number of solutions to help provide one of the following:

All of these things help to streamline your processing flow by reducing the amount of code someone (you or whoever might have to maintain it) has to read through to get a good understanding of what the code is doing.

Subroutines aren't the only way to provide this, and Perl, like many languages, offers a number of ways to provide modularization and code reuse. Subroutines can be separated into a separate file, a file of related subroutines could be made into a Module and even turned into an reusable Object.

All the commenters make good points, but I think you'll just have to take a look at your code while keeping these ideas in mind and see what makes sense.

---
echo S 1 [ Y V U | perl -ane 'print reverse map { $_ = chr(ord($_)-1) } @F;'

In reply to Re: when to use subroutine by tuxz0r
in thread when to use subroutine by convenientstore

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