in reply to Re: Password Generation and Module Multiplication
in thread Password Generation and Module Multiplication

Fair enough on the complexity of the "other" characters line. It is spelled out with explicit characters specifically to make it easier to add or remove given characters from the list. At the time, I think I had some warning that came up with the nested parens. Unfortunately my memory is a bit vague on that point. Those may simply have due to been a typo at the time. I will say though that with the use of "use strict; use warnings;" I do get at least the following warning:

Possible attempt to separate words with commas at test line X.

I'm sure there are more elegant ways to write the list though, including your fine use of map chr.

  • Comment on Re^2: Password Generation and Module Multiplication

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Re^3: Password Generation and Module Multiplication
by merlyn (Sage) on Nov 23, 2010 at 15:59 UTC
    At the time, I think I had some warning that came up with the nested parens.
    Which is why, in general, I don't add "use warnings" to the code I write. Sometimes, it finds useful things, but the only time it triggers for me now, it's simply annoying.

    If you find yourself changing the code you write to be more obscure or hard to maintain because warnings are warning you, warnings have failed.

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

    The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

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      Per contra, I always specify:   use strict; use warnings; ... and if there is any exception to that rule, I will place a no warnings "foo"; directive thereafter.   (If the unwanted warnings occur only in a specific block of code, the directive is placed on that block of code, then countermanded... and descriptive comments abound.

      In my experience, the warnings are usually correct; sometimes even prescient.   Computers simply don’t “overlook” things like aging humans do.

      I have to agree here. "Possible..." warnings really should only be given where there is a trivial change needed to get the warning to shut up. In this case, I'd say the warning shouldn't trip when , is preceded by whitespace.
      --
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        But that improvement doesn't go far enough. The "," and "#" warnings make me think it would be better to allow escaping inside qw. For example 

        my @tokens= qw( $  \#   ;  \,   if   else   else\ if );
             # '$' '#' ';' ',' 'if' 'else' 'else if'

        [download]

        The warning should be changed to: 

        Unescaped ',', '#', or '\' in qw ...

        [download]

        The trick is what level of deference to provide for backward compatibility of unlikely constructs. Silently changing the interpretation of qw( / - \ | ) would be bad. So I'd make qw( \ ) warn for a while before supporting escaped whitespace characters. I don't expect to find \# nor \, inside qw in existing code but maybe qw( \\ ) is slightly more common? That'd be the tough one to deal with.

        Maybe just add qqw() that supports escaping? I'd like to be able to even use \n, \t, and \x3e type constructs in qw() on rare occasions.

        I guess the current "fix" for the warnings is either no warnings 'qw'; or qw( . ? ! ), ',', qw( ; : ). I dislike the former as it can't distinguish the comma I meant to escape from the comma I slipped in by accident. So I tend to quickly end up replacing qw with quoted strings.

        Actually, I'd like qqw to ignore /\s#(\s[^\n]*)?\n/ as my desire to add comments is a common reason I end up replacing qw with quoted strings.

        - tye        

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