in reply to catastrophic near misses in Perl

Well, the archetypical "near miss" error is the off-by-one. This will hit you mostly when doing C-style for loops.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom