Re^2: Code Maintainability

[Porculus]

The other thing about statement modifiers is they make it harder to add stuff to the condition. (...)

If it were written as three lines to begin with, I wouldn't have to go through so much trouble to add the one extra action.

Sometimes "maintainability" is about "editability" rather than "readability".

Editability is about using a decent editor. For example, in Emacs you can convert between block "if" and statement-modifier "if" with a single command. If your editor can't do that, then I would argue it's your editor's problem...

As an aside, this looks clumsy to me:

print STDERR join("\n", @lines), "\n";

I've sometimes written that as:

print STDERR map { "$_\n" } @lines;

I wouldn't use either form; they both get too far away from mpeever's ideal, which I share, of code that reads like English.

If you want to print a bunch of lines to STDERR, I personally believe it's best to say "I want to print a bunch of lines", not "I want to build a string by joining a bunch of lines with newline characters, and then print that" or "I want to map a bunch of lines to a new array where they're terminated with newline characters, and then print that". In other words, I'd write:

print STDERR "$_\n" for @lines;

or, better still,

say STDERR $_ for @lines;

if you're lucky enough to have an up-to-date Perl, which of course many of us don't, in the workplace.