Advice without explanation is for children.

What's the best way, in your estimation, to explain to novice Perl 5 programmers that, given the vagaries and heuristics of S_intuit_method in toke.c, it's often easier to reason about the local and global effects of any individual unit of code if there are no barewords?

(I can count on my fingers the number of people who may be able to explain all eight rules for S_intuit_method without having to consult the code as a refresher, and I might be overestimating the number of people so qualified. If anyone, you're one of them, but I don't count on having all novices as experienced or ready to understand in full as you.)

This isn't about political correctness. It's about reducing the possibility of error in the same way that explaining that always, always, always adding a space between the file open mode and the filename in the two-argument form is as much a pattern for people to emulate as using the three-argument form. You know as well as anyone that novices tend to emulate examples without understanding them fully. Encouraging them to prefer constructs where, for example, the lack of an invisible character has no potential security flaws, seems to me to be more useful.

In reply to Re^3: unquoted string error??!! by chromatic
in thread unquoted string error??!! by aji

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