Re: the perils of others' perl - a cautionary tail...

[Trimbach]

Wow that's impressive... 35 system pipes? Ouch. I was once contracted to make some minor modifications to an existing (in production) web auction script. The changes the client wanted were pretty minor (some DBI changes to make the SQL more agnostic, plus some minor output changes) so I said "sure!" Problem was, the script was actually approx. 200 little scripts and config files, all them calling one another in a huge rats nest of global variables (everything was global), remote sub calls (sub A in file A calling sub B in file B, which in turn calls sub C in file C, all brought in using "use" with no scoping), etc. I spent two days trying to wrap my brain around it before I gave up. Insane.

Needless to say I am now much more cautious before I commit to modifiying large codebases... even little changes can be a nightmare if the code is bad enough.

Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer