Re: Adult learning problem

[grinder]

He's going to fight to the last against doing something 'childish', even though I assure him that when I'm coding professionally I'm doing little test scripts more than I'm working on the 'real' program.

Right on, jepri! I just had a quick scan on 4 different accounts here at work, that reveals some 400+ little test scripts. On each machine I have a ~/perl directory where I try out snippets to check how things work. For instance, the other day I had hesitations about how splice works, because I use it so rarely. So I whipped up "muncharr" which looks like:

#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my @arr = ('a'..'z');
my $nr = shift || 6;

local $, = ' ';
while( scalar @arr ) {
        my @block = splice( @arr, 0, $nr );
        print "@block\n";
}

With that, I was able to see straight away that my understanding of how splice worked was in line with reality. It took me about 2 minutes for take the time out to perldoc -f splice and test this out. I was then able to fold the principle back into my main code and safe in the knowledge that at least that part of the code was likely to be bug-free :)

And I suppose it is useful to stress that even little snippets are deserving of strict and -w. Also note how I wrote the script to use default value(s) that can be overriden from the command line.

print@_{sort keys %_},$/if%_=split//,'= & *a?b:e\f/h^h!j+n,o@o;r$s-t%t#u'