use Perl

• I like seeing the names of unitialised variables (Score:2)

  by nicholas (3034)

  I voted "none of the above" because my favourite thing is the way unitialised variables are now named, whenever possible:

  perl -we 'print $ENV{pie}'
  Use of uninitialized value $ENV{"pie"} in print at -e line 1.

  It's already saved me time today. Thanks Dave [iabyn.com] for making this work.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by tgape (9307)

    That's a great feature, and I definitely think it should've made the list, as it's my number two feature. It's close to //, but I just have too much perl 5 code which says defined $foo ? $foo : $bar.

    I think I'd probably rate the proper reporting of uninitialized variables higher, except I've done without for so long, I rarely encounter that problem anymore. But the defined check warts have remained year after year - it isn't problem code to be fixed, except that it bothers my code sense and I'm just tired
• More fun. More corner cases :) (Score:1)

  by merijn (853)

  Hard call, though I went for the regexp improvements. I'll probably use say only in one-liners, I don't think I will use state variables, I use defined-or since 5.8.0, so that is not new for me in 5.10, and the smart match will probably be used, most likely in combination with switches.

  --
  Enjoy, have FUN! H.Merijn
• all (Score:1)

  by sir_lichtkind (5541)

  has anybody figured out if given has the same goodness es in perl 6, read: leaves the given block immidietly when stepping out of a when block, so you can write things between the when block and write even more tricky code.
• use sort '_mergesort'; (Score:1)

  by mugwumpjism (1871)

  My favourite 5.10 moment was when I had finished writing a program [catalyst.net.nz] to do some re-ordering, and realising that I was sending in data to Perl's sort which was nearly already sorted - the worst kind of input to the quicksort algorithm - that Perl 5.10 has a pragma to make it use the sort I wanted. Nice.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Aristotle (5147)

    Hasn’t mergesort been the default for a while now?
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hobbs (3161)

      sort() has been changed to use primarily mergesort internally as opposed to the earlier quicksort.

      --perl58delta
• Going the unconventional (Score:1)

  by mrvaidya (8655)

  State variables and defined-or have changed the way I code Perl :). Yay for small, important changes between minor versions!
• say() (Score:1)

  by moritz (8678)

  I voted for say(). It's only a really small improvement, but the one that saved me the most typing.

  Second place is //.

  State variables are very cool, but it really takes for me to actually use them, because most programming languages I worked with so far didn't have something similar.
• // good feature, bad syntax (Score:1)

  by mhasch (9749)

  I like having a defined-or operator, but am not happy about its token. Yet another use of the slash, and one resembling an alien comment delimiter at that, ugh!