Re: Closure warning with Perl 5.14?

[wind]

Remove the if after the declaration of $color. It serves no purpose and is leading to the error:

my $color = shift;

If you were ever to need initialize a variable conditionally, be sure to use the ternary operator

my $variable = $condition ? 'value' : undef;

[BerntB]

Thanks. Yeah, that is the way to remove the warning.

The parameter is documented as optional, so I thought the code looked most obvious like that. I'll update my Best Practices.

[toolic]

I'll update my Best Practices.

perlcritic detects this by default:

Variable declared in conditional statement at line , column .  Declare
+ variables outside of the condition.  (Severity: 5)

Perl::Critic::Policy::Variables::ProhibitConditionalDeclarations

[anonymized user 468275]

By coincidence I have been having a similar problem in 5.8.2. When assigning a variable to a match backreference, at outer scope there was no warning when the match failed. When assigning it to a variable at level 1 loop scope from within a level 2 loop, it gave the warning that something was uninitialised in the match expression (an untrue statement). Furthermore, even using the ternary operator to force the variable to '' on match failure, the match warning was delayed until the variable was subsequently tested with a simple "if ($var)" at which point it made even less sense. I get the impression that Perl can sometimes catch its feet slightly when trying to process potential uninitialisation for variables being updated or initialised in a different lexical and sub-global scope from which they were declared.