use Perl

• Always use shift? (Score:2)

  by Ovid (2709) on 2002.11.19 15:51 (#14859) Homepage Journal

  Curiously, Ben Tilly mentioned that at least one company would ding you on a code review for using shift [perlmonks.org].

  Don't you think that you've just found a special case? Unless I misunderstood you, you would dislike the following:

    my ($self,$user,$pass,$action) = @_;

  For the that example, it seems clearer to use @_ rather than shift four times. It's clean and concise, though one might argue about the interface.

    my ($class, @args) = @_;

  How would you recommend using shift for that? It's a common idiom and again it's fairly clear. It seems to me that you found an unusual situation where you were bit by @_ not being cleared, but that seems like a bug in the author's code and not necessarily a bad programming practice. Admittedly, you now have the data duplicated in the sub, but unless someone is being stupid and passing huge argument lists, this doesn't seem like such a a problem (unless someone uses the above and then tries to diddle with @_, at which point they deserve their grief).

  I guess this is all a long-winded way of saying that I must be misunderstanding you.

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  • Re:Always use shift? (Score:2)

    by KM (4)

    No misunderstanding... I like shift. It's sort of like using warnings and strict.. helps protect you from stupid things that can occur (like this situation, copying large parts of data, inadvertandly having @_ diddled with unexpectedly, etc...) Also, I read code vertically, not horizontally (when scanning code), so 4 or more vertical shifts is better to me than many linear variables.

    Most things I write lately uses named params anyways. So there is only 1 or 2 shifts (2 if it is an object, for $self and the
    • Re:Always use shift? (Score:2)

      by Ovid (2709)

      KM wrote: Most things I write lately uses named params anyways.

      Hmm... perhaps you might be the target audience for what is arguably my most useless module [cpan.org] (Sub::NamedParams).

      Of course, if I ever get the courage to upload Acme::Code::Police [perlmonks.org], then that will qualify as my most useless module. I've been hesitant to do so due to potential hate mail -- not to mention lawsuits :)
      • Re:Always use shift? (Score:2)

        by KM (4)

        Hmmm... looks like simply passing a hashref is easier than adding a module to pass a hashref :) But, maybe I'll take a closer peek. I tend to not like using modules to do things which are easy to do without them.

        I still have to upload my Acme::ReturnOne and Acme::ReturnZero to be the two most useless CPAN modules.... EVER!!