Re^2: Best practices, revisited

[ysth]

For instance I'm a terrible typist (as all who read my CB-postings will readily agree), so I wouldn't think of writing even small scripts without "use strict;. On the other hand I rarely if ever "use warnings;"

I'd think you'd love the uninitialized warning, then. Maybe you never use constant hash keys?

[Jenda]

Or maybe not. Undef is too often a valid value or an expected return value. A warning for the read access to a nonexistent hash key might make sense. And would point to the line of the possible typo. Warning about the use of an undef, even if called "uninitialized value", is mostly pointless. It forces you to write more code and more code means more bugs and it often points to a wrong place in the code.

If you are afraid of mistyping the hash key, lock the hash via Hash::Util.

[ysth]

undef silently becoming "" or 0 is definitely attractive, but to me far from worth going without warnings. I don't find the uninitialized warning at all pointless; it almost always indicates a bug (sometimes a typo, but sometimes a logic error.) The extra work to avoid the warning in correct code is trivial and hard for me to get wrong.

[CountZero]

For some strange reason I seem not to have a problem with hash-keys. They get rarely mistyped.