Re: Summing repeated counts for items stored in separate file

Hi dmorgo.

Perhaps a minor point but I felt as though declaring lexical variables in a 'collective fashion':

my ( $key,$value );

# or...

my ( %tips_by_name, %av_by_name, %max_by_name, %min_by_name );
[download]

might lead to a state of frustration at some point. If one wishes to initialize one of the variables listed, it would be inconvenient to do so. Instead, I would advocate structuring your code like this:

my $key   = '';
my $value = '';
my %tips_by_name = '';
my %av_by_name = '';
my %max_by_name = '';
my %min_by_name = '';
[download]

Initializing one or more of the variables listed above to another value would now be trivial.

Hope this helps,
~Katie

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Re^2: Summing repeated counts for items stored in separate file by Anno (Deacon) on Jul 28, 2007 at 16:58 UTC
Why on earth would you do that? The scalars `$keys` and `$value` don't need initialization, but initializing to an empty string at least makes sense. Initializing a hash as in `my %tips_by_name = '';` [download] is, pardon the bluntness, plain nonsense. Under warnings, Perl warns about it. Anno	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Summing repeated counts for items stored in separate file by mrpeabody (Friar) on Jul 28, 2007 at 04:41 UTC
Initializing a variable in dmorgo's code would also be trivial. Your suggestion forces the programmer to do a lot of extra typing up front in order to maybe save a small amount of typing later, which seems like a poor tradeoff. I would also argue that dmorgo's code has a clarity advantage in that it is immediately obvious which variables don't have default values and which do.	[reply]