Re^4: Do not understand code

[Laurent_R]

Come on, sundialsvc4, do you really think that this:

unlink $file if /.BGV/;

is too clever? Or that it is not clear?

How so? If we set aside the fact that the regex pattern /.BGV/ may very well be an error and that, perhaps, /\.BGV/ or even /\.BGV$/ might better express the developer's real intent (but we can't know for sure and that's obviously not what you're concerned about), what's wrong with this? Is it the statement modifier (with postfix conditional)? Is it the use of a regular expression? Or is it the default match against the topical variable $_? Or something else?

But statement modifiers, regexes and implicit uses of $_ are all fairly basic features of the Perl language. If you don't know these or if you think they are too advanced, then maybe we should conclude that you just don't know Perl. Or that you know only a very small subset of it.

I certainly think that we should not try to be too clever. But that's not the case here. This code is fairly basic and well in accordance with Perl's philosophy.

And, BTW, I would be very interested to see how you would suggest to rewrite it. But can you?