Great big numbers full of digits are hard to read and be sure they’re right, so the PBP suggest using the magic underscore in the numbers to spread them out and make them more readable. (more…)
Author Archive
PBP: 039 Long Numbers
Thursday, September 11th, 2014PBP: 038 Leading Zeroes
Monday, September 8th, 2014Best Practice: Don’t pad decimal numbers with leading zeroes. (more…)
PBP: 036 Escaped Characters
Thursday, September 4th, 2014The PBP suggests using named escape characters instead of hardcoding ASCII values. It has some reasonable examples, such as this: (more…)
PBP: 035 Single-Character Strings
Monday, September 1st, 2014Much like empty strings, the PBP suggests being careful of how you write single character strings. It points out a number of them it considers “ambiguous”, including: (more…)
PBP: 037 Constants
Saturday, August 30th, 2014Mr. Conway’s book suggests that constants are good but “use constant;” is the wrong way to go about them. It suggests the Readonly module. Later commenters have suggested Const::Fast instead. Feh, I say. (more…)
PBP: 034 Empty Strings
Thursday, August 28th, 2014The PBP suggests never using “” or ” for empty strings, and using q{} instead. Because clearly that’s so much more readable. (more…)
PBP: 033 String Delimiters
Monday, August 25th, 2014The PBP suggests using interpolating string delimiters only when they’re needed. How much of my time do I get to waste changing single to double quotes because there’s a contraction in a message, or the other way because there isn’t? (more…)
PBP: 032 Utility Subroutines
Thursday, August 21st, 2014Here’s where the PBP tells you to prefix “internal use only” subroutines with an underscore. Why it calls them “utility subroutines” I don’t know. (more…)
PBP: 031 Ambiguous Names
Monday, August 18th, 2014Some words are easily misinterpreted, and the PBP suggests avoiding them for names. I don’t agree with one of the things it suggests you always avoid, though… (more…)