Re: Use strict warnings and diagnostics or die

[dragonchild]

Very good article!

However, I'd like to make the comment that Perl is used for a number of different purposes. The various pragmas aren't always needed, or even desired.

When Perl is used for CGI or applications development, especially if one is designing production code, then use every single pragma you can find. This is most especially true when developing production modules or scripts. (It'd be nice if every CPAN developer did this as well, but that's another story.)

However, a lot of people use Perl as a nifty version of awk or sed. For them, strict and warnings are a burden, not a benefit.

I'd modify your article to say that if someone is intending on building production-level code, then "use strict" and "use warnings" should be disregarded only if that person knows exactly why they are doing so (Some code is actually strengthened by turning off strict refs, but that's to get around a minor problem with Perl's OO implementation.)