It's worth noting, by the way, that using $foo != 7 as the control statement in an if statement is generally a Bad Idea. The unless statement is designed to cover that need, and using the != operator there just makes the code harder to read later when it must be maintained.
I second DrHyde (Re^3: if variants). It's definately not bad and neither is it a maintenance trouble. That whole sentence above should be removed from your text. It's just plain wrong.
The unless keyword is made to make you write code more like a natural language. It's not there to take !='s place in if expressions. They can both coexist happily and be mixed however you please.
Why the combination of unless and else is shunned by many is because it's a sort of double negation.
if (X) { ... } else { ... }
can be read
if (X) { ... } if (not X) { ... }
"unless X" can be read "if not X". Combining this gives you
unless (X) { ... } else { ... }
if (not X) { ... } if (not not X) { ... }
which just doesn't read well. Logically it's not strange but it's a funny and inappreciated way of expressing oneself.
My own (rather inconsistent) style is to use unless for exceptional behaviour, and if for expected/wanted behaviour. When using unless I usually want something, but something might stop me from doing that. With if I express that I perhaps want something, perhaps not.
print ... unless $quiet; # I want to print.
exit if $done; # I might want to exit here.
exit unless $stay; # I want to exit here, but apparently
# something is holding me back.
The examples can perhaps be better, and I'm not consistant myself in my use, but that's give you an idea of how I tend to use them.
ihb
See perltoc if you don't know which perldoc to read!
Read argumentation in its context!
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Thanks for the clarification. Mea culpa.
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Noooooo! != is fine. It's unless ... else that is hideously broken! | [reply]
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I can understand avoiding the != in an if statement, since using unless covers that functionality. I don't know why unless . . . else would be "bad", however. Explain?
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In English, saying "if this, do that, else do the other" makes sense and is easy for a person to parse. However "unless this, do that, else do the other" is much harder to parse because the "else" clause is a double negative (or even a triple negative if you have "unless not this"). Same applies to perl.
While you could, perhaps, argue that "if not this, do that, else do the other" is also a double negative, it's still easy to parse because it's familiar. We see it in every programming language ever.
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