use Perl

• Uhhm, yeah, but (Score:1)

  by jordan (120)

  • For the most part, the only warning perl issued during runtime for my programs 'Use of uninitialized value ...', which is a pretty lame warning since Perl defines new created variables to be, er, undefined.

  I always use 'perl -w'. I almost always find that 'Use of unitialized value' inicates a mistake that I need to correct. Sure, if you are testing for defined(), then the code can catch this and do something intelligent, but that's not usually the case in my code.

  Most typically, the use of an unitiali
  • Re:Uhhm, yeah, but (Score:1)

    by jjohn (22) on 2002.07.14 21:28 (#10582) Homepage Journal

    Maybe I don't understand what you're getting at or maybe our coding styles are radically different, but I pretty much always want to be warned that I'm using an unitialized value.

    I do 'use strict,' so don't take me for a total slacker. I haven't seen many situations in my code that the 'uninitialize' warning is helpful. With 'use strict' and a -wc check, I can catch typos at compile time. After that, I normally *depend* on values being uninitialized. For instance:

    my $tmp;
    while(<>){
       $tmp .= $_;
    }

    The first time through the loop, $tmp is undef so the concatentation op will generate that infernal warning. I do stuff like that all the time. Sure I could init $tmp to an empty string, but why bother? The language guarantees the behavior I desire.

    I'm also very aware of Perl's notion of truth, so I'm (frequently) careful to check defined() when I can get a false value that I need to inspect. Please post some code where -w at runtime has produced a helpful 'use of uninitialized value' message. I am interested to learn what other Perlers understand that I do not.

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    • Re:Uhhm, yeah, but (Score:1)

      by vsergu (505)

      But -w is smart enough that it doesn't generate "that infernal warning" with .= or += (or |=, for that matter). I think it did in some older versions of Perl.
      
      Can you give an example of code where the "uninitialized" warning gets in your way?
      • Re:Uhhm, yeah, but (Score:1)

        by jjohn (22)

        Jeez, I don't think I can. I got disgusted with -w back in the days of perl 5.004 and never looked back.