[Nh-pm] quoting list keys & values

[Erik Price]

On Friday, August 2, 2002, at 09:51  AM, Ben Boulanger wrote:

> It -is- considered good form to quote strings in Perl.  In fact, all of
> the perl scripts I write begin with perl -w and use strict - strict subs
> disallows unknown barewords (AFAIK) completely, where -w (warnings on)
> warns you about them.  For example:
>
> [bboulanger at .. bboulanger]$ perl -e 'use strict; my $junk = blah;'
> Bareword "blah" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at -e line 1.
> Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
>
> [bboulanger at .. bboulanger]$ perl -we 'my $junk = blah;'
> Unquoted string "blah" may clash with future reserved word at -e line 1.

Word to that.  (And I'll definitely take you up on the advice of using 
strict and -w.)  But my confusion arose from the fact that even when 
using strict, hash keys are exempt from the requirement of being quoted 
strings.

    localhost:~/tmp$ perl -we 'use strict; my %hash = ('a' => 1); print 
"$hash{a}\n";'
    1

Not only that, but when constructing a list for assignment to a hash, 
the string literal to the left of a fat arrow (=>) doesn't need to be 
quoted either!

    localhost:~/tmp$ perl -we 'use strict; my %hash = (a => 1); print 
"$hash{a}\n";'
    1

This is what I was wondering about.  You're not forced to quote these 
particular string literals even with -w and strict.  But ... is it good 
form to do so?

    localhost:~/tmp$ perl -we 'use strict; my %hash = ('a' => 1); print 
"$hash{'a'}\n";'
    1







Erik




---
Erik Price

email: erikprice at mac.com
jabber: erikprice at jabber.org