When -w and use strict aren't enough...

[RMGir]

(This might be more appropriate as a Meditation, or a Perl Gripe, if this site had such a section. But maybe someone has some Perl Wisdom to offer that could help me work around this issue...)

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I ran into an annoying problem today, again.

Whenever I code, I always use strict, -w, and code defensively. I try to test as much as I can, and I always make sure at a minimum that code is -c clean after any editing pass.

Great.

But I still get bit, on occasion, by typos in function names.

The only way you'll find out that there's a typo in

sub handleNewYear {
   # do something really useful
}

# ... lotsa logic...
if($mday==1 && $month==1) {
   handelNewYear();
}

is at run time, when the app croaks because "Undefined subrouting &main::handelNewYear called at...", and only if you happen to excercise that branch of your code.

If it happens to be your new year's day special case handling logic, I guess you'll get beeped out of the party :)

I realize there's no way -w could catch this; there could be autoloads providing the subroutine, or it could have been dynamically generated at runtime in an eval, or something.

But it would be nice if there was a way to catch such cases, without having to write a test suite that exercises every code branch, which isn't always (or even usually) possible.

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