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>As I see it, the Perl attitude is that these constructs should be forbidden by social contract rather than by the language itself. In most other languages wit

• Dove 17y ago
  It is useful writing one-shot programs on the command line. Perl's idioms can allow very powerful programs to be written very quickly in very small spaces. But any code that is saved to a file and run more than once should lean a bit more toward clarity of expression. Three rules the pathological counterexample breaks: put parens around your function calls if they might otherwise be ambiguous; put =~ before a regexp if its identity might otherwise be unclear, and for heaven's sake put your line breaks in sensible places. This snippet exists to be pathological, and would quickly lose its ambiguity if written by anyone with reasonable habits of self-expression. I am glad perl allows the balance between ruthless speed for programmer-efficiency and expressive clarity for maintainer-efficiency, for sometimes I write short one-shots and sometimes I write bulletproof modules, and I write many things in between. But don't use habits suited to the former in the latter case. If you do that, perl will shoot you repeatedly until you either improve or shoot yourself. And if you survive, then you will have to deal with the folks who inherit your code.