Laufeyjarson writes…

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 »

The Best Practices suggest extracting key or index lists out of large slices and using hashes to manage them. Read the rest of this entry »

Our favorite reference suggests that working with slices is easier when those items are aligned in columns.  Sometimes. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone’s favorite set of Perl guideliens tells is not to forget about the awesome power of array slices!  That’s smart, too. Read the rest of this entry »

The PBP reminds us that we can use negative indexes to access arrays in reverse, instead of having to do calculations for it.  It suggests several useful reasons, including readability and getting the interpreter to complain in some cases instead of silently doing the wrong thing.  I don’t feel that strongly about this suggestion, but do follow it. Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Conway suggests that you be wary of any modification to $_.  Personally, I take it further than that, and try never to use the thing at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of people (not just the Best Practices) tell you never to use the regex match variables.  Listen to them! Read the rest of this entry »

The PBP suggests using local on any changes to one of the global punctuation variables.

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The Best Practice is to ‘use English’ for the uncommon punctuation variables.  This has been a hard thing for me to get used to, but I have found it useful. Read the rest of this entry »

Mr. Conway suggests that you initialize any variable you localize. Read the rest of this entry »