Re: When warnings get in the way

[Old_Gray_Bear]

my $foo = " ";

Add six characters, three of them blank; there you go. It's not much of an effort, but in six months the maintenance programmer (and that might be you) is going to appreciate it.

By initializing the variable to a known state, you have told the Maintainer what you thought about the potential values that $foo can contain, and explicitly selected one of them as the default. Developers who think about the small things are more likely to be thinking about the bigger issues as well. It has been my unfortunate experience that people who do not initialize their variables often have other unpleasant coding habbits.

[davidrw]

That (and there was a similar suggestion above as well) doesn't help his problem.

  my $foo = ' ';  # or   my $foo = '';
  $foo = getFoo();
  if ( $foo eq "true" ){ ... }    # this will warn if $foo is undef
  $foo = $dbh->selectrow_array("select x from blah limit 1");
  if ( $foo eq "true" ){ ... }    # this will warn if $foo is undef

In these cases, the original default value doesn't matter because it's overwritten later by a 'third party' (some sub or dbh call), and the hint to the Maintainer doesn't help cause it's something else (e.g. some db value) that's being stored.

[derby]

$foo = getFoo() || "";

I really need to start paying attention.