Letting go of brackets is hard if you come from the C
school of bondage and discipline programming, where forgetting
something minor, like brackets on a function call, is
punishable by death ("Segmentation fault.").
When declaring arguments, I have found that the code
looks strange, inconsistent, and a little off-kilter when
mixing and matching declaration styles,
where 'off-kilter' is a euphemism for "looks broken":
sub Foo
{
# Arguments: ARRAY <- ARRAY
my ($ich, $bin) = @_;
# Local variables: SCALAR,SCALAR,...
my $x, $y, $z;
# Local constants: ARRAY <- ARRAY
my ($ein, $berliner) = qw [ jelly donut ];
# Single constant: SCALAR <- SCALAR
my $go = 5;
}
Any statement like 'my $count = @_' can make me feel a little
bit dizzy, if only because it seems like
anything could
happen there (i.e. concatenation with spaces, concatenation without,
first element assignment, last element assignment, count of items,
index of last item, etc.). Instead, I would rather explicitly
specify what is intended as 'my ($count) = scalar (@_);', though
rumor would have it that 'scalar' is deprecated.
Anyway, maybe I'm just behind the times. I use brackets on
int() and join(). I'll admit it! Maybe it's curable. As long
as I'm careful to make sure that my assignments are array-safe
(as I don't want to
go to jail)
then things work okay, in their own wacky way, and everything is
bracketized and compartmentalized neatly.
So, I can only suppose that you would prefer the following
mutant variation, suggested for fun:
my $filename = "/path/to/file",
$filemode = "immolate",
$opmode = "seek",
$filetype = "image/gif";