Every beginner programmer (of C-style languages) has to learn to deal with '=' (assignment) vs. '==' (comparison). Using = in an if clause is probably one of the most common early mistakes.
I'd like to think that I'm past that stage of my programming experience. However, about once a year I'll waste a couple of hours debugging to eventually notice the missing =.
I was working on some Javascript today and I had the feeling something was wrong with that if but my brain kept telling me to change the = to eq. Must be the jet lag from Ireland. Yeah, the jet lag. That's it, that's the ticket.
Re:Perl::Critic?
ChrisDolan on 2008-05-14T06:45:51
I was about to say yes, but then I checked and, no, we don't have a policy for that. CodePro has one for Java and that's what I was thinking of.:-)
As someone else said, I always write "10 == $x" instead of "$x == 10". It takes just a little getting used to, but it's a MUCH safer style. In autoboxed scalars, it works well too: in Java, "10".equals(str) is better than str.equals("10") because the former handles null gracefully and the latter does not.
For consistency, I try to put the constant first for every infix comparison operator.
I'll add a P::C todo entry right now.
