The point I'm making is that you don't know until run-time what functions are ultimately called, or what code will be executed. That's what you need to know to find out if the code is doing what is wanted, and it's completely unclear from those examples what lines of code will be executed.

You know the how: the scaffolding that will set up the coderefs and the eval.

You don't know the what: the important details about what coderef will be executed, which string will be evaled, nor what that code will really *do*. And that can be hard to find out. Tied variables mean that any statement involving variables could do absolutely anything unless I go back to the variable definition (often thousands of lines away), and find out if it's tied, and what it's tied to. Coderefs mean I don't get to know the name of the function being called. Evals mean that the code to be run can be hidden in a string built up entirely at run time.

Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I'd rather just see simple function calls with a few simple if statements. If I at least had that, I'd at least have the call tree as a framework for debugging: as it is, any function of in one of many, many modules might be called; none of the functions might be called (all dead code, with live code invented at runtime), and it will take a lot of investigation to find out the truth. At least with a call stack, I can just walk down the stack to find out what does what to what, and start making my guesses as to why.

And, you're right; you also don't know why the code does what it does, nor if it is correct behaviour. That's an additional concern, and a serious one; but not knowing what the code does in the first place makes trying to analyze for correctness hard.

*shrug* I don't know if I've made my point clearer, but at least I tried.

--
Ytrew

In reply to Re^5: RFC: feature proposal re code in @INC by Anonymous Monk
in thread RFC: feature proposal re code in @INC by blazar

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.