When I was new to Perl uninitialized values were the bane of
my existence. Many traps are eliminated simply by initializing all
variables. It's useful to init strings to '' and numbers to
0 so they can be freely checked and used after declaration without
having to worry about init errors. If there's a problem with the
program it will display the init values instead of crashing with
an error. My preference is always: not to crash.
my $value; # Error if condition fails.
my $value = ''; # Empty if condition fails.
if (condition) {
$value += 'something'
}
print "The value is $value";
