$_= shift for my ($i, $j, $k);
which is pretty foolproof, though unconventional (read "ugly").
Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.
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I usually avoid shift unless I specifically need that array reduction behavior. In the context of parameter processing this is usually in OO-land when one method needs to call another with the same arguments it was given, e.g.
sub method1
{
my $self = shift;
... maybe do some stuff ...
$self->method2(@_);
... maybe do some more stuff ...
return $something;
}
# or even more simply
sub method2 { shift->method3(@_) }
Otherwise I always my($c,...) = @_;
--DrWhy
"If God had meant for us to think for ourselves he would have given us brains. Oh, wait..."
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I deliberately use shift now, more and more, for two reasons:
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With the "my ($x, $y, $z) = @_" style, I don't have a clean place for those comments, unless I want to break the list on the left across many lines (ick).
Why not just put the type documentation into the embeded programmer documentation above your function? To call your function correctly, others need to know what they can and can't pass to it, and what will happen if they do. In other words, the type information is a valuable part of your function interface documentation.
I embed the documentation for my function interfaces (as well as general 'programmer' documentation), within a special pod section, dedicated to the "programmerdocs" pod translator. When I need to extract the user documentation, the regular pod translator ignores the programmerdocs section. When I need to extract the programmer documentation, I have a twenty line perl script that extracts the 'programmmerdocs' section, and pipes the results of those sections to the standard pod translator.
It's a bit of an abuse of the pod translator concept, but it works, and it keeps the two kinds of embeded documentation separatate, and easy to access. If anyone has a better method for keeping distict forms of documentation separate, I'm open to suggestions. So far, abusing pod has worked for me.
I like extractable function documenation, because it allows a tester to write unit tests for all the functions without reading any of the implementation details. If the code doesn't match the documentation, the coder needs to fix one or both of his code or documentation.
--
Ytrew
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sub foo {
my $param = shift || croak 'Param must be supplied';
}
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