Re^4: Common Perl Pitfalls

[jdporter]

use File::Slurp;

my $text = read_file( 'filename' );

Yeah, that's a whole day's work.
I submit that finding the documentation on such a method is substantially easier than finding the documentation (for lack of a better word) for the snippet you gave.

Note.
The "cost" of useing the module is amortized over all the calls you make to any of its methods (of which File::Slurp has several useful ones).

And the cost of downloading a module is amortized over all of the times you ever use it (at least on that machine).

[JavaFan]

Yeah, that's a whole day's work.

Maybe not for you or me. But for someone who needs half a day to type

my $test = do {local $/; <HANDLE>};

it could easily be.

[jdporter]

half a day to type

You keep dwelling on that, but I think you're misdirecting. He wrote, "spend half a day writing and debugging code", not "half a day to type in one line".

If someone has a bug they need to track down, they're far more likely to waste cycles on a line like $_=do{local$/;<>}; than one like $_=read_file($file);

Now let's compare apples to apples:

use File::Slurp;

my $text = read_file( 'filename' );

vs

my $text = do {
  local $/;
  open my $fh, '<', 'filename'
     or die "Error opening filename for read - $!";
  <$fh>
};

For most programmers, the former looks sane.