I think that is too harsh. I often put scalar in when it is not neededfor the same reason that I use parens which are not needed - I know that the code is likely to be edited by someone who has not memorized the various contexts.

Now in a perfect all Perl world, I would agree with you. But when my code needs to be understood by programmers who are not primarily Perl programmers, well I am confident that I can teach them to remember that Perl has both scalar and list contexts, and they do different things. But when they have to edit my Perl after a month in other languages, I do not believe that they will retain fast reactions for which syntactic constructs imply scalar context.

So I leave in the crutch, and since everyone knows that I do this deliberately, I don't see any reason to comment it.

OTOH in code which will only be seen by people who are supposed to be competent Perl programmers, well I drop it...


In reply to Re (tilly) 4: Pass on name of array by tilly
in thread Pass on name of array by Anonymous Monk

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.