note
grinder
<blockquote><i> cramming a dozen functions onto one line in some kind of clever but completely unreadable tangled chain</i></blockquote>
<p>I'm not quite sure I'm in agreement with this one. It's not tangled, it flows from right-to-left. It's such a nice idiom that Perl 6 introduces the <tt>==></tt> operator, in order to reverse the flow. It will go from left to right, and I suspect the result will be much more readable.</p>
<p>And if you think it's a tangle, the style question at hand is that of the Correct Use of Whitespace. A well-indented chain of functions should be eminently readable.</p>
<blockquote><i>massive amounts of referencing and dereferencing</i></blockquote>
<p>No disagreement with this one. Programmers in C used to create intermediate <tt>typedef</tt>s in order to get around this problem (like a "pointer to array of functions returning an int with parameters of a pointer to a void function taking an int and an array of characters").</p>
<p>While this exact problem doesn't arise with Perl, the problem of decoding what a massive dereferencing statement is doing can be pretty brain-melting.</p>
<div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-29008">
<p align="right"><font size="-2">• another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl</font></p>
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