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Postings from July 2000
>I have been reading Camel III and am a little disappointed that it does not
>recommend -w and strictness as essential to the beginner.
page 15:
So like topicalization in a natural language, topicalization in Perl
"warps" the language that you'll use from there to the end of the program.
In fact, some of the built-in modules don't actually introduce verbs at
all, but simply warp the Perl language in various useful ways. These
special modules we call I<pragmas>. For instance, you'll often see people
use the pragma C<strict>, like this:
use strict;
What the C<strict> module does is tighten up some of the rules so that
you have to be more explicit about various things that Perl would otherwise
guess about, such as how you want your variables to be scoped. Making
things explicit is good when you're working on large projects, because
by default Perl is optimized for small projects. But with the C<strict>
pragma, Perl is also good for large projects that need to be more
maintainable. Beyond that, since you can add the C<strict> pragma at any
time, Perl is also good for evolving small projects into large ones, even
when you didn't expect that to happen. Which is usually.
page 20:
A not-so-random clue: while learning Perl, and even after you think you
know what you're doing, we suggest using the B<-w> option, especially
during development. This option will turn on all sorts of useful and
interesting warning messages, not necessarily in that order. You can put
the B<-w> switch on the shebang line, like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
See also pp 137 and 601, just to name a few.
--tom