Re^7: Sub Return Value Help

I just belive in establishing "Best Practices". If it is better for one instance, and has no negative effect in any instance, why not make a habit of always doing it the "best" way? Granted there are a million instances in which a bareword filehandle will not hurt you... But there are as many instances in which putting a gun to your temple and pulling the trigger will not kill you... but that still doesn't mean you should do it.

Update: Please enlighten me: when would it be "impossible" to use a lexical scalar over a bareword filehandle? If there is such a situation... I cannot imagine it.

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Re^8: Sub Return Value Help by gellyfish (Monsignor) on Aug 02, 2005 at 07:57 UTC
You appear to have completely reversed the sense of my last paragraph. I was saying completely the opposite. You are still saying that lexical filehandles are somehow "better" in all cases without providing any concrete reasons. I would agree that lexical filehandles are extremely useful in some circumstances, but I am not buying into this notion that bareword filehandles are somehow "bad practice" just because you have decided to assert this as fact. /J\	[reply]
Re^9: Sub Return Value Help by fishbot_v2 (Chaplain) on Aug 02, 2005 at 13:30 UTC
You appear to have completely reversed the sense of my last paragraph. I was saying completely the opposite. No, I think that it is very simple: you admit that there are cases where bareword filehandles are impossible to use (and you are quite correct). Now, (he asks) are there cases where lexical filehandles are impossible to use, and barewords are preferable? I assert that there are not. Rather than switching back and forth in a dog's breakfast of filehandles, most programmers like to pick the cleanest, most flexible option to standardize on. Now if you change your code in the future from one of those "bareword ok" cases to a "bareword impossible" case, you don't have to alter every reference to the old filehandle. Personally, the winning argument for me is that the scope of a lexical FH is lexically restricted. All things being totally equal, I will pick the option with the narrowest possible scope of effect. I do agree with you that this matter has little to do with the actual question at hand. It is worth mentioning to beginners, though.	[reply]


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