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Postings from February 2013
On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 8:30 PM, Tom Christiansen <tchrist@perl.com> wrote: > SUMMARY: Let's rename perlopentut and write a new one from scratch. +1 I think a newbie tutorial rewrite is a good idea. Thank you for stepping back, realizing that, and providing a draft. I have smallish quibbles, some factual (perlfaq5 vs perlfaq4), and some stylistic and a bunch of thoughts which are less well resolved in my head. I do appreciate the switch to showing 3-arg open. I strongly favor showing "or die..." instead of "|| die..." because the lower precedence operator is safer should parentheses be omitted. *Note*: I am *not* advocating removal of parentheses nor saying that "||" is invalid or wrong. I'm saying that the low-precedence "or" for trailing statement clauses is more robust in the face of programmer error and is thus a better style for newbies to copy from. I really appreciate the strong statement about specifying encodings explicitly. It may not be common in practice, but it is *exactly* one of those things that people were never taught and thus rarely do. I think pipes and sysopen can be left to a "more than you wanted to know" document. I would mention "flock" in perlfunc as well as pointing to perlfaq5. I wonder if it is worth discussing IO::File->new and the equivalence to "open". (At the end -- in a section about IO::File specifically, most likely). Likewise, I wonder if it is worth discussing autoflush or how files don't get flushed to close. (I leave the question of error checking close to the other thread. :-) I wonder if it is worth briefly mentioning that binmode is not really the same as specifying an encoding on open, or if this just opens the Pandora's box of evil that is PerlIO layers. I think it is worth mentioning (briefly) that "write" is not the opposite of "read". David -- David Golden <xdg@xdg.me> Take back your inbox! → http://www.bunchmail.com/ Twitter/IRC: @xdgThread Previous | Thread Next