I tried strict once, it gave me a lot of prudish back chat so I deleted it again and went on my way rejoicing. After a while I began to wonder why my code was such a shambles. Then I found the monastery and got pelted with rotten fruit and had my feet held over a pot noodle until, without really knowing why, I gave in to peer pressure. Only after doing strict for a while do I begin to realise why it's such a darned good thing.

Now I think a of immediate practical benefits one gets from use strict would be a nice thing to have: we could refer agnostics and atheists to it, to bring them to the light more speedily.

Reason 1
If you often get hash values out of hash references (for example if you use DBI to get items from your databases) you may sometimes forget your syntactical sugar. Under strict you get an error if you write $ref{LineID} instead of $ref->{LineID} (unless you already declared an array called %ref which is most unlikely, not to say unwise). But without strict you might very well plonk the "value" back into another DBI query, and end up pulling out line 0 from your database without knowing that was what you were doing.

Over to you, siblings...

§ George Sherston

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