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Postings from October 2006
On Oct 2, 2006, at 10:26 AM, jerry gay wrote:
> On 10/2/06, Jonathan Lang <dataweaver@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm not used to programming styles where a programmer intentionally
>> and explicitly forbids the use of otherwise perfectly legal code. Is
>> there really a market for this sort of thing?
>>
> use strict;
>
The advantage of "use strict" is that it is purely advisory. If
you're about to do something
sleazy and you know it, you can always use the escape hatch of "{no
strict; ... }".
Any such restrictions that a coder places on future users of his code
or template should also be
advisory. One big advantage of Perl 5 is that there is an advisory
class structure that can
be overridden in cases of extreme need, even when the original coder
clearly intended that you
never override the interface. (an example is DBI, which wraps its
objects up inside tied hashes simply to prevent access to the inside
by less-than-determined coders)
Restrictions are useful for code style control, but mainly as
markers: "Here be dragons", or whatever. For the case of someone who
wants that (Jonathan's words) "any declaration of method 'm' that
doesn't conform to this signature should be illegal", it should be
possible for the method coder to override that restriction by taking
some explicit action in the source. Otherwise we'll have the
programming equivalent of evil no-fast-forward previews on DVDs.
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