I object to those "always" you are using in your list. You wouldn't be able to create useful modules like Exporter and Memoize, if you always had to use strict. Same with warnings. Perl generates warnings if it things the programmer makes an error. But sometimes, Perl is wrong. The right thing to do is turn warnings off, instead of having to go through hoops to satisfy Perl.

As for point 3, I couldn't agree less. CGI.pm is a monster, doing far more than just CGI (come on, producing HTML shouldn't be a part of a module calling itself CGI). In the rare cases I do any CGI programming, I tend to avoid it like the plague.

As for you tab issue, it's a good example why tabs should be avoided. Your example indicates a tabwidth of 4. Any idea how that's going to look like on a terminal with a default tabstop of 8? Sure, the left indents will all be lined up, but can you garantee none of the lines will exceed 80 characters? Any idea what's going to happen if one of the tabs is replaced by 4 spaces, and someone using tabstops of 8 is going to view it? It won't align correctly anymore.

Tabs are evil. The savings in disk space and I/O might have been significant 30 years ago, but they aren't nowadays. With spaces, the indentation will always look the way the author intended it to be (given fixed width fonts). With tabs, it will only look right if all authors and viewers used the same tabstops.

Abigail

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