In the last few days I've tracked down some very odd bugs, mostly resulting from uncaught Perl syntax errors. Here are two I've recently seen.

• Test::More spit out a ton of "Confused test output: test X answered after test Y" warnings. There was no possible way I was printing to a file handle conntected to any stream in use by Test::More. The cause? a stray comma: print $fh, $sData instead of print $fh $sData. Had I used a literal handle, e.g. STDERR, Perl would have given me a nice warning, but with a variable used as a file handle it was none the wiser until Test::More complained. (Perl 5.8.8)
• Perl complained "can't call method CLICKS on undefined value" except that the value WAS defined! Guaranteed! The cause? A module had the line return 1 outside of a sub. Had I run a top level script with return outside of a sub, Perl would have kindly told me that you can't use return that way. However, because the return statement was loaded as a module rather than used within an entry point script, Perl didn't catch the mistake. (Perl 5.8.8)

I'm wondering what others we've seen. Perhaps a list we could refer to might save a lot of time consuming head scratching.

P.S. I tried to super search on this topic, but wasn't able to find a similar thread. Perhaps I just have weak search foo (I'm certain this topic has come up before), so if anyone can have better luck than I, perhaps those nodes could also be collected together and posted as a list so we can have a single place to look?

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