Going over someone's code and within five lines I'd seen no -w, no check of the return value of open, and a halfassed homebrew reimplementation of the standard FileCache module. The alarm bells were ringing so loud in my head that they temporarily drowned out the voices telling me to kill.
--Nat
I don't generally put -w in start-up line. I figure that the average runner of the tool isn't going to care enough to look up the warnings they get, and when I'm testing/debugging I run the script using "perl -w" anyway. It makes it easier with shell-history-substitution to add/subtract other flags like -d.
On the other hand, anything that is important enough to go from one-liner to actual script runs under strict, even if it's only 10-15 lines long.
Re:I, Heretic
jjohn on 2003-04-25T12:42:00
I don't generally put -w in start-up line.
Me too. I include 'use strict' in the smallest of scripts, but -w is bloody useless. 'perl -wc ' is great though. Screw runtime warnings.
OH PLEASE WARN ME ABOUT 'use of uninitialized value in concatentation (.)' AGAIN!
Re:I, Heretic
vsergu on 2003-04-25T14:33:15
I've found that 'use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.)' usually indicates something wrong. Remember that it doesn't warn if you're just using.=on an uninitialized variable. It happens, for example, when I interpolate an uninitialized variable into a string. Do you normally want to do that?Re:I, Heretic
jjohn on 2003-04-25T19:58:43
yup. Most of the time, I don't care.
Re:I, Heretic
gnat on 2003-04-26T01:24:10
Interesting difference in coding style. I like to make my programs -w clean by initializing variables and generally being a tidy Kiwi. That way if I get an "uninitialized value in concatenation", I know something's happened that I didn't expect. I use Perl's warnings to help me find bugs, rather than treating them as an irritation to be muzzled. I don't have a high opinion of my programming skills and will take help whereever I can get it!:-) --Nat
Re:I, Heretic
vsergu on 2003-04-27T01:05:35
Same here, but in fact I've internalized the rules for when warnings occur enough that I don't initialize things that Perl doesn't warn about, like strings that I'm going to use.=on, or arrays that I'm going topush()things onto, or sometimes booleans that I may later set to true. And now when I use PHP I get irritated because PHP's warnings are different and I have to do more initialization -- also it isn't as good as Perl at warning about possible typos in variable names ("name only used once").Re:I, Heretic
pudge on 2003-04-30T14:27:19
I use -w, and this:I like -w. In Slash we just have so many lines of code that variables are not always initialized (and frankly, I find that initializing every variable causes a lot of clutter when you already have a ton of lines of code).# this is the worst damned warning ever, so SHUT UP ALREADY!
$SIG{__WARN__} = sub { warn @_ unless $_[0] =~/Use of uninitialized value/ };
As the Debian webmin maintainer
jaldhar on 2003-04-25T04:25:08
...I've had to dig into the code a lot and I've found it's not so bad. The thing I really wish jcameron had done was to use some kind of template scheme. Currently html is hard coded in all over the place.
