in reply to Think for yourself.
in thread is the use of map in a void context deprecated ?
Abigail-II: That "three line patch" is one of thousands that bloats Perl. If you want to discourage people from calling this a bad thing, we can't stop you.
With regards to your argument that nobody considers it bad style that the return value of print and other functions are not checked, I disagree. Many people consider it bad style, but see no practical solution to the problem. People have argued for years (on and off) that print should really raise an exception. The matter has never been closed off. It has only been put off.
With regards to your argument that it is really a bug that map in void context creates a list, I find your argument to be faulty. It is only the knowledge that the 3 lines patch has been applied (i.e. intimate implementation knowledge of the language) that has since encouraged people to continue to use map in void context. Intuitively, and according to the original documentation, most reasonable people would assume that a list was created, and would only be pleasantly surprised to find that the case was optimized now so that the list is not created.
With regards to your last argument that calls all people who disagree with you "sheep", and points out that no patch was provided, I think you have missed the point. The people who consider it bad style did not *want* to submit a patch. They did not *want* Perl to be officially implemented to encourage such a bad style. And yet, now that a patch was submitted, and included, this very thing has happened. Respected members of the Perl community such as yourself encourage (or silence the discouragers, which is the same thing) the very odd practice of using a list transformation control structure to iterate through a list.
It isn't as if this sort of practice is un-Perl. After all, Perl is the language that encourages people to use operations like "tr/a/a/" to count the number of a's in a string.
I use Perl because it is practical. I don't use it to ensure that non-Perl-familiar members of the community will be unable to understand my code.