my $foo = " ";

[download]
Add six characters, three of them blank; there you go. It's not much of an effort, but in six months the maintenance programmer (and that might be you) is going to appreciate it.

By initializing the variable to a known state, you have told the Maintainer what you thought about the potential values that $foo can contain, and explicitly selected one of them as the default. Developers who think about the small things are more likely to be thinking about the bigger issues as well. It has been my unfortunate experience that people who do not initialize their variables often have other unpleasant coding habbits.

----
I Go Back to Sleep, Now.

OGB

In reply to Re: When warnings get in the way by Old_Gray_Bear
in thread When warnings get in the way by Sprad

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.