But to at least illustrate what I'm talking about, consider:
if (undef($a) || undef($b)) { ... }
and then there's the ever popular
if ($a = 1) { ... }
I'd put these two in the category of "Common Goofs for Novices". The
Camel Book has a section dedicated to this.
So, in addition to your competition, I'd be interested in seeing a list of common Perl goofs. I've certainly seen plenty over the years, since we have a lot of "occasional" Perl programmers at work. Some random ones that I remember seeing often at work are:
- @x[42] instead of $x[42].
- print FH, "hello\n";
- /$name/ where $name might contain regex metachars (should use /\Q$name\E/ instead).
- /some regex/; $x = $1 .... That is, using $1 et al without checking that the regex actually matched.
Related to this is a WTF-style competition. I noticed an amusing one reported by Dominus the other day, namely what is wrong with this code?
for my $k (keys %hash) {
if ($k eq "name") {
$hash{$k}++;
}
}
Answer: it is better written as
$hash{name}++ ... which is an example of the classic Larry quote:
Iterating over the keys of a hash is like clubbing someone to death with a loaded Uzi. :-)
