use Perl

• Cool DRY-inspired idiom (Score:1)

  by jplindstrom (594)

  Very cool and useful idiom to declare variables inside the GetOpt call. I'll start doing that and not type things twice.
  
  Thanks.
  • Re:Cool DRY-inspired idiom (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ovid (2709)

    Thanks. I saw that in someone else's code and I realized that my has a return value: the variable that it's declaring. This is not exactly clear from the docs, though. Maybe I should submit a doc patch. Hmm.
    • Re:Cool DRY-inspired idiom (Score:2)

      by Dom2 (2981)

      I like using it as part of an if statement:

      if (my $foo = bar()) {
          print "I got $foo\n";
      }

      -Dom
      • Re:Cool DRY-inspired idiom (Score:3, Interesting)

        by gav (2710)

        I like the idiom but I've always been disapointed you can't write:

        if (my $foo = bar() and $foo =~ /bar/) {
           print "\$foo is bar\n";
        }
        • Re:Cool DRY-inspired idiom (Score:3, Informative)

          by Ovid (2709)

          You can't do that because the variable doesn't come into scope until after the current statement finishes executing. Fortunately, that's an easy fix.

          perl -le 'sub bar{ "baz" };if ((my $x = bar())=~/baz/){ print "yes" }'
          • Re:Cool DRY-inspired idiom (Score:2)

            by gav (2710)

            The problem is that that causes a warning if bar() returns undef.