Re^2: unless vs. bare block

[JavaFan]

They are local variables and so avoid the generally evil programming practice of keeping state in global variables.

Generally, avoid the evil practice of being too general. There are lots of cases where it doesn't matter at all, or where other trade offs can be made. Remember, people could have used lexical filehandle references since 5.000, but it wasn't until they autovivified that people actually started to use them on a larger scale. The world didn't burn up in flames in the mean time.

They close themselves automatically when their lexical variable goes out of scope.

Yeah, and so will "bare word" handles. You can even limit their scope by using local.

They avoid the confusion of barewords. IMHO, barewords are an unfortunate Perl feature and should be avoided

Wait. You're saying we should write &foo and "Module::Foo"->new instead of foo and Module::Foo::->new, because they're barewords, and unfortunate? You're sure you mean this?

As for why the three-argument form of open is preferred, the old two-argument form of open is subject to various security exploits

You've no idea where the second argument is coming from. For all we know, there's no problem. Don't scare people.