in reply to Perl oddities
print FH @list
Normally this doesn't bother me unless I have to use parens (due to a parsing or emacs alignment issue)...
print(FH <list>);
... looks even worse.
The other thing I think is odd is how split() removes null fields at the end of a line if you don't give a LIMIT argument. Normally when I process a delimited file I expect each line to have the same number of fields, though some may be empty. For short scripts I tend to write quick sanity checks like this...
my @values = split /:/, $line; die "invalid line: '$line'" unless @values == 7;
It looks nice, but I have to remember to go back and set LIMIT to a negative (or large) number.
In Section
Meditations