Laufeyjarson writes…

The PBP suggests that when you want to reverse a scalar, you explicitly state this with ‘scalar reverse $variable’ instead of just using reverse on it.  It suggests this both makes explicit, and regularizes the use, regardless of the context it is called in.

I don’t like this suggestion and don’t feel it is needed, but I won’t object to it because of the clear example in the book that makes it clear how it helps.  I find the demand you add a ‘scalar’ all the time because sometimes it’s unclear to be a problem.  I’ll probably turn off the critic warning for this, but I won’t say it’s too horrible.

Mr. Conway suggets using the reverse builtin when appropriate.  This includes with sort, and for counting backwards. Read the rest of this entry »

The Best Practices have things to say about many of Perl’s built-in functions.  Besides the general advice “use them” – which I agree with – it has some specific suggestions.  First up: Sorting Read the rest of this entry »

It is a Best Practice to check the spelling, syntax, and sanity of your documentation.  I agree with this, strongly. Read the rest of this entry »

The PBP suggests a way to put longer blocks of documentation in code, by using the =for or =begin/=end notation in POD.  By labeling these with a “formatter” that does not exist, they’ll never be output and are merely ignored by the compiler and for the author’s use. Read the rest of this entry »

The Best Practices suggests that a need for a lot of comments explaining things might indicate that the section of code is confusing and could be written more clearly.  Rather than writing words to try and explain it, can the code itself be clearer? Read the rest of this entry »

This practice is simple, and probably covers a lot of the places I appear to have been waffling between one view and another.  The book says to comment anything that puzzled or tricked you.  Pretty simple?  The questionable part is that everyone will find different issues tricky. Read the rest of this entry »

The Best Practice discussed here is to use short comments at the end of the line to provide extra detail and make possibly obscure code a little clearer.  I think this can be very useful, but I’m not sure it plays well with a 78 character margin as suggested elsewhere, especially if the function involved is complex and you’re more than a couple of tab stops from the margin. Read the rest of this entry »

The Best Practices suggest using a full-line comment before a paragraph of code to explain the algorithm.  This is, in my experience, good advice, and what comments should be used for. Read the rest of this entry »