Re: sed/awk/grep to Perl

As the other experienced Monks have said, yes, it's definitely worth it.

However, you should write a comprehensive unit test suite against the code you currently have before changing anything, so that the new code can also be tested against those tests to ensure that it operates at minimum exactly the same way. You should also ensure your code is in a Version Control System of some sort, so that you can easily revert out changes that break things.

Comment on Re: sed/awk/grep to Perl

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Re^2: sed/awk/grep to Perl by haukex (Archbishop) on Nov 09, 2020 at 20:21 UTC
However, you should write a comprehensive unit test suite against the code you currently have before changing anything, so that the new code can also be tested against those tests to ensure that it operates at minimum exactly the same way. I just wanted to note that it's also possible to write the tests just against the command being run - luckily the interface to external commands is well-defined (usually just the commandline, `STDOUT`, and perhaps some files), so it's not too difficult to write a comprehensive test suite that tests the commands in the system or backticks, and then run that test suite against its pure-Perl replacement. Although I agree that a comprehensive test suite against the entire program would of course be very helpful and should eventually be built, the aforementioned approach allows one to make changes and write tests for a smaller scope first.	[reply] [d/l]

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Re^2: sed/awk/grep to Perl
by haukex (Archbishop) on Nov 09, 2020 at 20:21 UTC

However, you should write a comprehensive unit test suite against the code you currently have before changing anything, so that the new code can also be tested against those tests to ensure that it operates at minimum exactly the same way.

I just wanted to note that it's also possible to write the tests just against the command being run - luckily the interface to external commands is well-defined (usually just the commandline, STDOUT, and perhaps some files), so it's not too difficult to write a comprehensive test suite that tests the commands in the system or backticks, and then run that test suite against its pure-Perl replacement. Although I agree that a comprehensive test suite against the entire program would of course be very helpful and should eventually be built, the aforementioned approach allows one to make changes and write tests for a smaller scope first.

[reply]
[d/l]