In addition to the self doubt aspect, I was also concerned about misleading other monks with a sub-optimal answer.

For example, I am subscribed to several ActiveState Perl mailing lists (which I believe you are quite active on Jenda). Very soon after subscribing to one of the lists I answered a question regarding the syntax of how to 'dereference' an argument that has been passed to a subroutine:

sub foo
{
  my ( $array_ref ) = @_;
  my @array = @$array_ref;
  ...
}
[download]

That was all well and good, except someone else pointed out what I failed to mention. Any changes made to @array would not be made to the array that $array_ref referenced. The person asking the question did not indicate if they were intending to modify the original array, but if they were my answer might have introduced a 'bug'.

This led me to decide that I should be more careful in my answers, only answering when I was confident I fully understood the question and the implications of my answer. Of course this being 'careful' led to never answering another question. Perhaps I should become a little more vocal on the mailing lists as well. ;)

Thanks for the reply, Jenda++.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.