I meditated on a similar point recently here following a review of some code I was looking at for another project.

Ooohhh, Rob no beer function well without!

1. Use meaningful (read: unmistakeable) variable names
2. Declare things in the smallest scope they can be used in.

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

Good example, Perl will happily compile and run this without complaining in the least - bonus points for an explanation why:

foreach (@list) {
  $conn-do("insert into foo values($_)") || die;
}
[download]

foreach (@list) {
  $conn->do("insert into foo values($_)") || die;
}
[download]

jeffa

One slight correction...

strict 'subs' and strict 'vars' run their checks at compile time, but the third goblin in that group strict 'refs' enables runtime checks.

(sorry, I was inspired by the dancing skeleton on your homenode ...... ;-) )

Consider the following code, which will toss a strict error during runtime, depending on the flip of a coin:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;

use vars qw($foo $bar);

$foo = 'x';
$bar = int(rand(2)) ? 'foo' : \$foo;

print $$bar, "\n";

=OUTPUT (when rand==0)
x

=OUTPUT (when rand==1)
Can't use string ("foo") as a SCALAR ref 
while "strict refs" in use at ./strictrefs.pl
line 9.
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-Blake