But to at least illustrate what I'm talking about, consider:
if (undef($a) || undef($b)) { ... }
and then there's the ever popular
if ($a = 1) { ... }
I'd put these two in the category of "Common Goofs for Novices". The Camel Book has a section dedicated to this.
So, in addition to your competition, I'd be interested in seeing a list of common Perl goofs. I've certainly seen plenty over the years, since we have a lot of "occasional" Perl programmers at work. Some random ones that I remember seeing often at work are:
- @x[42] instead of $x[42].
- print FH, "hello\n";
- /$name/ where $name might contain regex metachars (should use /\Q$name\E/ instead).
- /some regex/; $x = $1 .... That is, using $1 et al without checking that the regex actually matched.
Related to this is a WTF-style competition. I noticed an amusing one reported by Dominus the other day, namely what is wrong with this code?
for my $k (keys %hash) {
if ($k eq "name") {
$hash{$k}++;
}
}
Answer: it is better written as $hash{name}++ ... which is an example of the classic Larry quote: Iterating over the keys of a hash is like clubbing someone to death with a loaded Uzi. :-)
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|