Laufeyjarson writes…

This best practice is a simple suggestion: Put every raw list in parenthesis.  It’s good. (more…)

The best practice is not to mix low and high precedence boolean operators.  This is both good and bad, but following the rule can save your sanity. (more…)

The PBP cautions us not to use commas to separate and sequence statements.  I think this is good advice most of the time. (more…)

Perl has a weird but cool operator, the “fat comma”, written as =>.  It’s a comma, but with a special property that means a bareword on the left side is allowed.  They’re often used for initializing hashes without having to quote every hash key.

The PBP suggests reserving => for items that go together, or, as it says “for pairs”.  Name => value pairs, mostly.  These things are related to each other and => makes that visible.  (more…)

Perl supports “barewords”, which are strings that just sit naked in your program.  If it isn’t parsable code, it’s a bareword.  The PBP says: Don’t.  I agree, as does ‘use strict’, which I always use. (more…)

The PBP suggests that all heredocs be explicitly and deliberately quoted.  When I first read this, I didn’t know you could do that!  It’s a great idea. (more…)

Mr. Conway suggests making all heredoc terminators single uppercase identifiers which start with a standard prefix.  This is part of naming things regularly, and I support it. (more…)

The Best Practices suggest that putting a heredoc in a deeply nested function looks funny because it has to be left-justified, and suggests creating a “theredoc” by writing a function that does nothing besides evaluate and return the heredoc. (more…)

The PBP tells us to use here documents when a multi line string is too long.  It suggests two lines is long enough for a single string, and anything longer should be a here document. (more…)

The PBP suggests breaking your strings on any embedded newlines so they look in code something like they’ll look when output. (more…)