On Thu, 2004-03-11 at 05:20, Orton, Yves wrote: > use constant ARG1=>$ARGV[0]; > > is better
Absolutely. the begin block posting was a hurried and untested example of how to use a BEGIN block. By the time people subscribe to module-authors you'd think they would know how to use a BEGIN block to evalueate some parts of their program before the rest of it. I suspect that since @ARGV is set before any compiling happens, a bign block might not actually be needed in that case at all. A better example would have had a complex startup phase entirely within the BEGIN block, and the last thing in the BEGIN block is, to establish the 'constants' through whatever mechanism is appropriate, such as reading the rest of the source code through a source filter that replaces the 'constants' with their values, in single quotes, rather than making Perl compile and optimize. For that matter, the source filter could output ANSI C and pass it to yor compiler. Somebody give me a grant!
