Here's my horrible confession. We often hear that you can program Perl to resemble your favorite programming language/style. C-style for loops are the classic example:

for ( my $i = 0; $i < @array; $i++ ) {
 ...
}

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We're admonished to avoid that, if possible, due to classic "off by one" errors.

my @array = qw/ zero one two three four /;
for ( my $i = 0; $i < $#array; $i++ ) {
    print $array[$i],$/;
}

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LISP programmers appreciating the aesthetics of the Schwartzian Transform is another example.

Confession time: I used to be a COBOL programmer. Oh, I used strict, warnings, taint checking, and whatever else I thought was "good", but I had a bad habit of writing my subroutines "COBOL-style", with the exception of passing in the arguments.

sub foo {
    my $arg = shift;
    foreach my $data ( @data ) {
        $bar[ $data ] += $arg;
    }
}

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I know better now, but it took me a long time to see the error of my ways :(

Cheers,
Ovid

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In reply to Re: Perl aesthetics: the good, the bad, the ugly. by Ovid
in thread Perl aesthetics: the good, the bad, the ugly. by vladb

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