Every language has its esoterica and every language has features that make future maintenance more challenging than it should be. I'm not saying never use substr as an lvalue; I'm saying (turgidly, perhaps) is that idiom should be eschewed if it conflicts with clarity.

I doubt if writing
if($current_line =~ m/abc/)
will confuse a real Perl programmer, just as I doubt that
DO LOOP_COUNTER = START, FINISH
will confuse a real Fortran programmer.
Why not write
 DO I=J,K
instead?

I will agree idioms are there for a reason, but the idioms are not the language. Fortran, a language I've dealt with for several decades, has all sorts of idioms which are generally considered Bad Things. Most corporate style guides forbid Fortran programmers from using computed and assigned gotos and arithmetic if statements, both perfectly legitimate idioms. Perl has a goto; it's there for a reason, but that doesn't make its use a good idea.

emc

In reply to Re^3: Meaning of Maintanability and Functionality in Coding Perl by swampyankee
in thread Meaning of Maintanability and Functionality in Coding Perl by neversaint

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.