[sf-perl] Related to Perl Best Practices / a Perl::Critic Rule

Brian Friday brian.friday at gmail.com
Thu Feb 25 07:34:49 PST 2010


There is one specific Perl::Critic rule that confounds me and I am wondering if anyone can shed any light into the why of it. 

You have a Perl program with:

	print "Something\n";

Run it through Perl::Critic and you get the following error:

	Return value of flagged function ignored - print at line 27, column 1.  See pages 208,278 of PBP.  (Severity: 1)

Change the line to:

	print "Something\n" or croak "blah\n";

Perl::Critic no longer has any issues with the code, life continues on. 

If the print had a $var call in it, this croak does not stop you from printing on uninitialized values. I have been mulling it over but for print itself I have not been able to find a definitive "this is a good idea because...." .

Thoughts?

I treat the PBP and Perl::Critic as a guide to good Perl coding behavior and not a book of rules. That said I like to understand a rule before I throw it out. This rule just happens to be one I come back to because no answer I have come up with pushes me over the use it side or lose it side of the fence. 

- Brian


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