You can get meaningful without hyperextraneoverbositude. %matches_in_file or %count_for_file are extremely descriptive without requiring me to read the entire goram piece of code to figure out what exactly is going in %hash. Any decent editor will also let you autocomplete the name after the first one or two times anyhow so the overall length of the name isn't an excuse. And if you're going to be lazy-cutesy using the default subject variable $_ at least has the virtue of possibly shortening your code.

Absolutely context free names like "this" and "that" just mean the maintenance programmer that follows n months hence is going to curse your crappy style, not praise your brevity and wit.

Addendum: As to the lack of whitespace in the penultimate line, I'd just say it's people who write stuff like that in production code that give Perl the (somewhat deserved :) reputation for being executable line noise. Without reasonable whitespace you've got to scan back and forth to see where the breaks are (of course Mr. Maintenance programmer probably just learns to run anything you ever wrote through perltidy and tosses the originals away day one . . . ).

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

In reply to Re^3: regexp for directory by Fletch
in thread regexp for directory by halfcountplus

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