"I must admit the lady wasn't too persistent and I realised she was only doing what she's been told to do."

A Morrisons spokesman said: "This is done with the best of intentions and we would hope it is taken in good humour by those obviously over the age of 21, as we do not wish to cause offence and no disrespect is intended.

"We take our responsibility with regard to selling alcohol very seriously and all our stores operate the Task 21 scheme, which addresses the difficulties staff face in being able to determine if a customer is legally old enough to buy alcohol.

"To further limit any element of doubt, staff at the Acomb store are required to ask anyone buying alcohol to confirm that they are over 21."

Continue to force people to do things contrary to their understanding of what is best in a given context, only because there are rules that say so, and you end up with them not being able to trust their inner guidance any more.

Perl is so much about context and expression, which comes along with ambiguities, that rule enforcing ultimately leads you to fighting your tool.

If by some odd chance I have to live under the sway of Perl::Critic (or PBP, for that matter), I'll continue to say mkdir $dir, 0755 and not convert the flags to decimal, and I'll say opendir (D, $dir) or die "foo: $!\n" despite grouping parens for builtins being deprecated, because that way I can work best, fast, and I can read my code. Any other perler also can; the aforementioned expressions will only seem wrong to those which know PBP and don't know TIMTOWDI.

I'll continue to use perl "to get your job done, before your boss fires you" (which you sometimes is me, sometimes is you). I guess I will have gob enough to argue with any PHB, and the code fixing a la Damian will be paid for, as well...

--shmem

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}