use Perl

• Hmmm. (Score:1)

  by Abigail (26)

  Is that really a mistake? Seems to me that 'validate' is a function that validates strings. It just so happens that in this call it needs to validate the result of a method that was called on the same object.

  It's a trade-off. If you write 'validate' such that it doesn't take argument, but calls 'user' on its first parameter, you have a function with a simpler interface. OTOH, the function is less general than it can be - all it can do is validate its own user. It also should have been named differently, f
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by Ovid (2709)

    I shouldn't have called it 'validate'. I guess that was a red herring. My boss has given me permission to sometimes post code snippets so long as I make it clear it's code being cleaned up and that I don't reveal any business knowledge. As a result, I really can't post more context. In this case, it was closer to something like this (still anonymous, but closer in intent):

    sub _post_to_website {
        my ($self, $user) = @_;
        my $lwp = LWP::UserAgent->new;
        ...
    }
    
    # and
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by markjugg (792)

    I agree with Abigail. Explicit argument passing makes it clearer what happening, and can make the code more re-usable.
    
    A methodology of sticking everything thing in the object and then referencing it there is a close cousin to the evilness that is global variables.
    
    However, if you code is full of $self->user always being passed to $self->validate.... there could be a problem.
    
    
• A counter-example ... (Score:2)

  by drhyde (1683)

  Consider the case where you usually want to validate something (eg whether a user has permission to access a file) for the current user, but sometimes for some other user, like in File::Find::Rule::Permissions [cpan.org].

  This means that at least sometimes you have to pass in that parameter. For the sake of making the parameter list easier to parse, or to avoid confusing maintenance programmers by having the same method take two different forms of its arguments, I think I would at least consider always passing in th