[Wellington-pm] comparison and assignment: insignificant optimisation

[Richard Hector]

Hi all,

I often find it necessary to do some comparison, then do something with
one of the operands. Here's a common example:

sub max_length {
  my @list = @_;

  my $current_max;
  foreach my $item (@list) {
    if (length($item) > $current_max) {
      $current_max = length($item);
    }
  }
  return $current_max;
}

What irritates me is that the length of the string is evaluated twice.
That, I admit, is probably not very expensive, but it irritates me
nonetheless, and it could be worse if it's something more complicated
than finding the length of a string.

I know I could get round that by putting the result of length into a
temporary variable, but that irritates me just by adding lines of code :-)

I was wondering if there was a simpler way - maybe something like one of
those action-assignment operators, like += or ||=.

Any suggestions?

Richard