use Perl

• Language as a guide towards intuition (Score:1)

  by Aristotle (5147)

  Nice writeup, and well put.

  Another point that I would have made is: often, novices structure code in weird ways, with procedures that aren’t very useful outside the context in which they were conceived because they are big and do too many things. They use variables that get recycled over too many intermediate calculations, or conversely fail to break calculations into intermediate steps saved in variables.

  Naming is a good detector for such problems. If you can’t think of a good precise name
  • naming arrays after their members (Score:1)

    by mr_bean (3802)

    When I name an array after the objects it contains, I don't know whether to use the plural, or the singular, ie whether to call it objects, or object.
    
    @persons means I start saying $persons[0], $persons[2]. @person reads nicer when referring to the elements, $person[1], $person[2].
    
    But the second might confuse a reader of the code?
    • Re:naming arrays after their members (Score:1)

      by Aristotle (5147) <pagaltzis@gmx.de> on 2007.03.17 8:37 (#53850) Homepage Journal

      For arrays and hashes, I always use the singular form. The plurality is already implied by the sigil – putting it in the name as well would be repetition. Note also that there are many cases where you use the collection as a whole, which read nicer with a singular name, such as push @person, $last_record (OK, I suppose that can be argued either way) or keys %person_name.

      Reply to This

      Parent