in reply to The joys of bad code

Came across some code I just had to share. How many steps is this programmer from good, idiomatic perl?

sub padfield {
   my ( $value, $fieldlength ) = @_;
   
   while ( length $value < $fieldlength ) {
      my $pad = '0';
      $value = join( '', $pad, $value );

   }
   return $value;
}

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  1. A creative use of join(). But why not just use simple string contcatenation: $value = $pad . $value ?
  2. You could use the string repetition operator $value = ("0" x ($fieldlength - length $value )) . $value.
  3. Or you could use take the right substring of an over-padded string.
  4. But even a C or Java programmer should know printf padded formats: return sprintf "%0$fieldlengthd", $value.

--
TTTATCGGTCGTTATATAGATGTTTGCA

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