On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 11:52:26AM -0700, Timothy Johnson wrote: > > As much as I would hate to make you cry, if I had my way, I'd remove > that as well as the default variable $_. It would be like the first > time you had to convert all of your scripts to use the strict pragma, > but in the end it would make people's code more legible. It's the Perl > equivalent of having to remember 'I before E except after C...'.
While it seems difficult to justify keeping a special case around that makes the behavior of Perl kind of surprising (in a bad way) sometimes, I think eliminating $_ is just gratuitous do-it-my-way-ism. So much for TIMTOWTDI, I guess. We'll all just knuckle under and write code the way some people think it "should" be written. The fact of the matter is that having the option of using $_ doesn't change anything when people don't use it. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you eliminated it from the language, you'd be hurting more than you helped. Hard to read code doesn't exist because of $_. It exists because $_ is abused. Removing syntactic sugar from the language doesn't magically turn bad programmers into good programmers. . . . just one man's opinion. -- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ] Ben Franklin: "As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously." -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
