in reply to Re: Pass on name of array
in thread Pass on name of array

Quick note: if you use the above solution, change the '<' in the conditional of the for loop to '<='. e.g.: 
for ($br = 0; $br <= $#{$array}; $br++)

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'#' when applied to arrays returns the last valid index, so a less than conditional will fail on the last valid index, meaning that index will never be used. Alternately, you could use the size of the array: 
for ($br = 0; $br <= @$array; $br++)

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or, to eliminate any ambiguity, 
for ($br = 0; $br <= scalar(@$array); $br++)

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Re: Re: Re: Pass on name of array
by merlyn (Sage) on Apr 05, 2001 at 21:52 UTC 
    for ($br = 0; $br <= scalar(@$array); $br++)

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    Please don't add the extra scalar. It confuses your maintainer, unless you comment it as 
    # we don't need scalar here... it's for the dummies who can't grok sca
+lar context yet

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    So I would fail it out of a code review without that comment.

    If someone doesn't understand that <= provides scalar context, they have no business editing my code.

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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      I think that is too harsh. I often put scalar in when it is not neededfor the same reason that I use parens which are not needed - I know that the code is likely to be edited by someone who has not memorized the various contexts.

      Now in a perfect all Perl world, I would agree with you. But when my code needs to be understood by programmers who are not primarily Perl programmers, well I am confident that I can teach them to remember that Perl has both scalar and list contexts, and they do different things. But when they have to edit my Perl after a month in other languages, I do not believe that they will retain fast reactions for which syntactic constructs imply scalar context.

      So I leave in the crutch, and since everyone knows that I do this deliberately, I don't see any reason to comment it.

      OTOH in code which will only be seen by people who are supposed to be competent Perl programmers, well I drop it...

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