I'm curious to know when we should or shouldn't be abrupt to newbs regarding responses to their coding issues. This is a very theoretical question. I'm not claiming right or wrong, I'm just interested to know when past Perl code should be looked at as obsolete in our responses. For instance... suppose someone says:

I'm trying to iterate through an array, and I'm doing the following.

my @a = qw( a b c );

for ( my $i=0; $i<3; $i++ ){
    say $a[$i];
}
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We could bitch that we don't do "C for loops" and respond like this:

for my $elem ( @a ){
    say $elem;
}
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But what if they wanted the iteration number? We could throw out (what I just learnt yesterday a trick that was back-ported from Perl6 into 5.12 (each for arrays))

while ( my ( $iter, $elem ) = each @a ){
    say "Iteration $iter contains $elem";
}
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...but where does it end? Do we have a common guide to follow when responding to questions here on PM?

ps. This question goes much deeper than coding questions, but you know that. Is there consistency is my inquiry...