Re: function prototyping & perl 5.8.20

[topherv]

Hi monks, I figured I’d share my learnings. When I rolled up to perl 5.8.20, a few of my modules gave errors. The errors pointed at the function declaration lines. I changed:

Sub function()
{

To:

Sub function() {

After making these changes, there was one more fix:

foreach my $key qw( id group title rank )

To:

foreach my $key (qw( id group title rank ))

I saw many other places where my functions were defined with the ‘{‘ on the next line. But, things were running. I wondered if I removed the “use strict”, if the function errors would go away. So, I undid the function changes. The code still worked!

This means the functions weren’t my problem at all, just the foreach line. But the compiler could not point to that line until I corrected all the functions. So, having the ‘{‘ on the same line as the sub is good coding practice, but not required for perl 5.8.20

Thanks for you help!

[Tux]

$ perl5.12.5 -we'for my $k qw(a b) {$_=$k}'
$ perl5.14.0 -we'for my $k qw(a b) {$_=$k}'
Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated at -e line 1.
$ perl5.16.3 -we'for my $k qw(a b) {$_=$k}'
Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated at -e line 1.
$ $ perl5.18.0 -we'for my $k qw(a b) {$_=$k}'
syntax error at -e line 1, near "$k qw(a b)"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

If you upgrade, you might as well read the release notes. Oké, if you take big steps, there are a lot of changes to read, but all of this is documented.

See the 5.14.0 delta entry:

Read more... (1380 Bytes)

And the 5.18.0 delta entry:

Read more... (1150 Bytes)

Which makes me think you made a move from perl-5.10.1 to perl-5.18.0 or newer. As you state 5.8.20 (which never existed), I assume you mean 5.28.0.

[dave_the_m]

Note that there's no such perl version as 5.8.20. perhaps you mean 5.20.0???

Dave.