In addition to the self doubt aspect, I was also concerned about misleading other monks with a sub-optimal answer.

For example, I am subscribed to several ActiveState Perl mailing lists (which I believe you are quite active on Jenda). Very soon after subscribing to one of the lists I answered a question regarding the syntax of how to 'dereference' an argument that has been passed to a subroutine:

sub foo
{
  my ( $array_ref ) = @_;
  my @array = @$array_ref;
  ...
}
[download]

That was all well and good, except someone else pointed out what I failed to mention. Any changes made to @array would not be made to the array that $array_ref referenced. The person asking the question did not indicate if they were intending to modify the original array, but if they were my answer might have introduced a 'bug'.

This led me to decide that I should be more careful in my answers, only answering when I was confident I fully understood the question and the implications of my answer. Of course this being 'careful' led to never answering another question. Perhaps I should become a little more vocal on the mailing lists as well. ;)

Thanks for the reply, Jenda++.