The other thing about statement modifiers is they make it harder to add stuff to the condition. (...)

If it were written as three lines to begin with, I wouldn't have to go through so much trouble to add the one extra action.

Sometimes "maintainability" is about "editability" rather than "readability".

Editability is about using a decent editor. For example, in Emacs you can convert between block "if" and statement-modifier "if" with a single command. If your editor can't do that, then I would argue it's your editor's problem...

As an aside, this looks clumsy to me:

print STDERR join("\n", @lines), "\n";

I've sometimes written that as:

print STDERR map { "$_\n" } @lines;

I wouldn't use either form; they both get too far away from mpeever's ideal, which I share, of code that reads like English.

If you want to print a bunch of lines to STDERR, I personally believe it's best to say "I want to print a bunch of lines", not "I want to build a string by joining a bunch of lines with newline characters, and then print that" or "I want to map a bunch of lines to a new array where they're terminated with newline characters, and then print that". In other words, I'd write:

print STDERR "$_\n" for @lines;

or, better still,

say STDERR $_ for @lines;

if you're lucky enough to have an up-to-date Perl, which of course many of us don't, in the workplace.

In reply to Re^2: Code Maintainability by Porculus
in thread Code Maintainability by mpeever

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.