Re: Perl Best Practices for naming variables

[EvanCarroll]

in reply to Perl Best Practices for naming variables

my $xXXxxX = 'Hooray lets all debate and negate styling practices. How useful. I prefer to call all my variables some permutation of Xs only differentiated by caps, that way I know they are all variables, and I don't even need sigils. My way is also better, in the event that perl ever drops the need for sigils, my variables will be easily distinguished from barewords! They can also dub over as binary where the lowercase is 0 and the upper 1'..
print $xXXxxX;

[creamygoodness]

Well, I'm open to persuasion. For instance: another recommendation in the book is that you code in commented paragraphs, but limit those comments to a single line. Doing that will cause me some difficulty, as I occasionally write a paragraph that sacrifices some clarity for the sake of speed of execution, then compensate for the opacity of the code by overcommenting.

Damian suggests that if you require more than one line to summarize a paragraph of code, you probably need to refactor it. From here on out, I will be thinking about that every time I find it challenging to summarize within a single line. It's a stylistic constraint, but it has architectural ramifications. Thought-provoking stuff!

XOXO,

--
Marvin Humphrey
Rectangular Research
http://www.rectangular.com

[adrianh]

Doing that will cause me some difficulty, as I occasionally write a paragraph that sacrifices some clarity for the sake of speed of execution, then compensate for the opacity of the code by overcommenting.

Of course you did profile the simple clear solution first before creating a more complex and harder to maintain solution - didn't you ? :-)

[creamygoodness]

Of course you did profile the simple clear solution first before creating a more complex and harder to maintain solution - didn't you ? :-)

Here's the start of a thread on the Portland Perl Monger's list where I consider adding C code to Sort::External, then opt for a simpler solution after benchmarking.

http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/pdx-pm-list/2005-July/002885.html

Do I pass? ;)