Importance of coding standards depends also on the size of the project. For 5 lines - even use strict; is overkill. But the bigger the project, the more programmers involved - the stricter standards you should have.

I worked recently on a project with 40MB of source code (not in perl) - as a result of 10 years of development. Without rather strong coding standards (using custom toolkit) and agreed-on procedure names performing standard - trying to understand system will be much harder. 40MB! After 2 years, I was expert in one small part, conversant in couple others, and know who is expert for what part.

In projects like that, game is not about ... possibly taken longer to understand, but has been rewarding and enhanced my understanding... . It's about plain survival... :)

So if you insist on using perl without coding standards in such a project, I'll propose to use other language - or I'll prefer to work on different project.

pmas
To make errors is human. But to make million errors per second, you need a computer.

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