Re: ASCII Battleship Program

A few comments:

All your subroutine definitions use the "no parameters" prototyping by virtue of adding "()" in their definitions. Indeed none of your subroutines take any parameters, so that is not wrong, but then you call al your subroutines by prepending "&" to their names which has the effect of ignoring any prototypes. It is far better to delete all the prototyping as it probably does not do what you think it does and also delete all the "&" in the sub-calls which serve no purpose here.
You have a peculiar way of naming your variables and subroutines. While not "wrong" as such, it is not the perlish way. I wonder what was your native computer language before you started programming in Perl. Anyhow, the use of "::" in variable names and subroutines is reserved for using packages ("namespaces", if you wish), but you do not use packages here and frankly for a program of this size that does not use any modules, it is overkill to use namespaces. Everything can safely live in the main package (which is the default package).
Your use of local is ... strange. Did you do it so your program runs under use strict;? Again, probably you have a wrong concept of what local does. If you want to declare global (in the sense of can-be-seen-and-accessed-everywhere) then you can safely use lexical "my" variables, placed outside of any subroutine or block.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

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Re^2: ASCII Battleship Program by perlStuck (Sexton) on Feb 05, 2012 at 13:33 UTC
I do realize that in the context in which I have used it, protoyping is quite useless. This was at a time when I was rather unsure what prototyping really even was. I simply saw others doing it, and actually thought until recently that it was simply part of the manner in which one defined subroutines. As for the naming of the variables and subroutines, what I was originally planning to do with this was put all the code into one, large program that would allow me to select between other games I played, word processer, possibly an HTML Parser (probably some kind of open-source text-browser already out there) etc. etc. In fact, I was actually intending to make a whole OS-like 'shell' program, for the heck of it. Such aspirations were, naturally, soon abandoned, as such a program was hopelessly out of reach for me. I felt that the naming conventions I used would permit me a broader area of flexibility with which to write other mini-programs in the 'OS'. With `local`, all I was attempting to do was make it so that subroutines called by other subroutines had access to the same variables that called them. This was before I was particularly well aware of the practice of accepting arguments by use of the variable `@_`. I felt that such use of `local` suited my purposes fine, as it would keep all of the variables well within the bound of the battleship program, but would not allow them to seep out into the broader program. My native language is Perl. However, being self-taught, I've developed a style of programming that is probably not only not the greatest, but also simply rather strange looking. But I generally manage to get stuff done, so I'm generally pretty happy with how I code. I do rather fear for whoever's going to have to maintain my code, though . . . .	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: ASCII Battleship Program by GrandFather (Saint) on Feb 06, 2012 at 19:45 UTC
That stranger who is going to maintain your code is ... you - about a month from now. True laziness is hard work	[reply]
Re^3: ASCII Battleship Program by Anonymous Monk on Feb 05, 2012 at 14:28 UTC
For your perusal, two free books, http://learn.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/ First principles in programming and the Perl syntax , and Modern Perl a loose description of how experienced and effective Perl 5 programmers work....You can learn this too.	[reply]
Re^4: ASCII Battleship Program by perlStuck (Sexton) on Feb 05, 2012 at 17:47 UTC
Thank you! The book I was using really didn't cover the nuances of Perl, and didn't cover OOP at all. As for `perldoc`, I'm not really advanced enough to slog through loads of documentation to get what I want. I'm looking forward to reading the both of them.	[reply] [d/l]

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