I too, in my humble opinion, find "program line" to be a horrible title. It's not a question. It's a thing. It's ambigious. Congratulations if you can correctly guess what the question is going to be, but i find that there a lot of poorly chosen subject titles because it is hard to come up with a synopsis that describes the question succintly enough to fit. Most SoPW are too busy concentrating on their problem, and coming up with a good title is second to getting their question answered.

"How Do I Get the Line Number In My Error Message?" is much much better, in my humble opinion.

Even better would have been "How Do I Get the Program Line Number In My Error Message?" ;)

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

What do you think of something like "__DATE__ ?" for a node title? It seems like it would be pretty clear to any C programmer that the Seeker was looking for the perl equivalent to the __DATE__ macro. And since Perl has __FILE__ and __LINE__, I think most monks could figure out the intent of the question even if they didn't know a lick of C. Thoughts?

In C, __DATE__ is a way to retrieve the compile date. But in Perl, compiling and running are done by the same process, so we could just do something like

my $compile_time;
BEGIN { $compile_time = time; }
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You read the question first and then figure out what you think would be a better title. Perhaps "What is Perl's equivalent to C's __DATE__ macro" or "What is __DATA__ used for?" (__DATE__ is very close to __DATA__ after all)

Then, you don't change the title. You consider the node and give your suggestion for the new title and let the other janitors give their thoughts on the title.

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

Well, in the context of this thread, I'd call it misleading...

But, that aside, if it were the title of a top level SoPW and related to either the __DATE__ preprocessor constant—which is available in perl if you use -P, by the way^†—or even if someone just typo'd __DATA__, I'd say it should be left as is.

† Not that you should do be doing that...

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

Rather I suggest that Perlmonks is popular and well regarded because of its culture. I say this culture has two core characteristics:

• correctness - care about doing things well in the large and small matters. Ha! note this foofaraw regarding re-titling.
• generosity - care about others. As a group, monks kindly treat the naive, lost, and abrasive strangers.

Correctness leads us to not have P3r1munks painted on our gate. That same desire has us retitling nodes. This thread is inspired by a marginal case: the node could reasonably stand with its title. That said, I much prefer that the title was changed.

I feel the "broken window syndrome" is germaine. I am repeatedly impressed by the timeliness of our editors and considerers. I think the speed with which these functions are executed is important. When a janitor sees a mess and quickly moves to clean it up I find myself reluctant to criticize: It's too clean.

print reverse split //, "BQ gninrom yadnom rehtona tsuj";
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Be well,
rir

First, my apologies to both ysth and itub for mis-attributing the comment (They'll get messages).

Secondly, I absolutely agree that "good" vs "bad" node titles is a subjective decision. I'm disagreeing with your opinion about this particular case.