Laufeyjarson writes…

The Best Practice is to use map when generating a new list from an old one.  The reasoning is good, but I struggle with it anyway.  I’m getting better with effort. Read the rest of this entry »

The statement made by this Best Practice is simple, “Always declare a for loop iterator with my.”  The reasoning behind it is complex, and surprised me.  I am sure I have screwed this up in the past, too.  It’s important as there’s a real gotcha here! Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Conway suggests that you give explicit names for all for loops, and avoid the possibly confusing use of $_.  To this I say: Hallelujah! Read the rest of this entry »

In those places you do actually need both the key and value, you will have to go ahead and do the lookup on the key to get the value.  The PBP reminds us to only do that once, instead of many times in the loop. Read the rest of this entry »

The Best Practice suggests avoiding subscripting arrays or hashes within loops.  They have a good reason too! Read the rest of this entry »

The Best Practices cast the use of C Style For Loops out of our lexicon.  Personally, I don’t get why this is, but haven’t needed them in a while. Read the rest of this entry »

The PBP simply states, “Don’t use unless or until at all.”  I don’t agree with the strength of that statement. Read the rest of this entry »

The PBP suggests one simple thing for using other postfix control structures, such as unless, for, while, and until.  It says: Don’t. Read the rest of this entry »

Having given a concrete statement of “… always use the block form of if.” the PBP then gives you a time and place to use a postix if.  It says that’s okay if  you’re it for using a flow control statement like next, return, last, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

The first entry in the “Control Structures” group regards the humble if statement.  Perl being perl, the if statement is more complex than it looks, and the Best Practices casually state, “… always use the block form of if.” Read the rest of this entry »