Melb.pm meetings

[Scott Penrose]

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On Thursday, January 10, 2002, at 12:12 , Jeremy Howard wrote:
>> You mean there are people out there not using strict :-)
>> Only kidding. Damian would have lots to say about only using police if
>> you are in New York, and needing only Mounties if in Canada :-)
>>
> Damian scares me--he never uses strict, and it doesn't seem to bother 
> him at
> all. I don't think I'd be able to produce working code without it, on 
> the
> other hand. I guess that's why Damian is a Damian and I'm not. ;-)

Personally I can't see a reason to NOT use strict...
However, in Damians case, especially modules such as "NEXT" (one of my 
favorite examples of why perl is cool, an extension to the language 
written in native perl) you have to not use strict.

I have a philosophy that I try and force on our developers where I work, 
which is you can do bad evil things in perl (eg: NEXT) and that is fine, 
but abstract it off into a separate module, both reusable and easy to 
test, code review etc.

A good example is complex sorts. A neat feature (see use.perl.org) a 
while ago suggested that the fastest way to do a sort on multiple fields 
is to use pack and then the built in sort without an anonymous sub. By 
not passing a sub you are using the built in fast C sort method. Very 
cool, one of our developers used that to produce a massive increase in 
the performance of a mail system. However the code looks confusing and 
nasty, so it is best to either put it in a class method somewhere or 
make the array an object and a new method on that.
eg:
	foreach my $bit ($ref->sort)
or
	foreach my $bit (MyFastSort::sort(@somearray))

Scott
- ---
Scott Penrose
Open source and Linux Developer
http://linux.dd.com.au/
scottp at dd.com.au
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