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…)
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…)
Best Practice: Don’t pad decimal numbers with leading zeroes. (more…)
The PBP suggests using named escape characters instead of hardcoding ASCII values. It has some reasonable examples, such as this: (more…)