Best Practice: Don’t pad decimal numbers with leading zeroes.
In my mind, this isn’t a best practice. It’s an error. You can’t pad decimal numbers with leading zeroes – they turn into octal numbers and are wrong.
The book suggests people might do this to make columns of assignments line up. If I liked that, and if I did it by hand it might be tempting, but I don’t. I use spaces. Better, I let perltidy via the editor use spaces and stop spending brain power on it.
The book also suggests not using leading zeroes for octal digits, and using the oct() function. I think this is overkill. Leading zeroes mean octal, use them as they need to be used. Don’t add a run-time function call instead of just using the right constant because octal is unusual in this era.
I dislike having to make the assumption that the person reading this program doesn’t actually know the language and will be confused.