Re: Re: Re: Some suggestions on coding style - a chance to critique

[broquaint]

I thought that I would have to pass a reference to the scalar in order to modify them (i.e. - \$variable). Is this not true?

You don't *have* to pass by reference to modify variables as @_ is just a list of aliases (it's magic you see) e.g

sub foo {
    $_[0] = "modified in foo()";
    print "in foo()\n";
}
my $var = "a string";

print "\$var is $var\n";
foo($var);
print "\$var is $var\n";

__output__

$var is a string
in foo()
$var is modified in foo()

However passing by reference is more explicit, but that then introduces in the issue of 'dirtying' your arguments which is generally agreed to be avoided if possible. I believe the reasoning is that entering a function shouldn't modify the state of your program, although this can usually be ignored with more complex data e.g throwing around hashes is potentially pricey.

I could push everything into a seperate data type, but wouldn't that make things a little less clear and require "not necessary" lines of code?

At the worst it will require a line or two of code, but organising your data is far more likely to *reduce* your code. Let's take send_mail() for example. Currently you have 8 arguments, whereas I'd probably reduce that to 2 arguments with all the sendmail-related information in a hash or even a hash of hashes. But then again I think that all this throwing about of data is a symptom of a mis-organised program, to which I think part of the solution would be re-structuring the data as once you have well-defined data structures the program tends to follow.
HTH

_________
broquaint