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Postings from February 2001
On Fri, 16 Feb 2001 21:03:54 -0800, Edward Peschko wrote: >It is one hell of a burden to find a missing 'use strict' or 'use warnings'. >'Well, type them then' you say. Right, and always type ';' at each line, or 1; >at the end of each file. Its as unavoidable as a *syntax error*, which is the >point. syntax errors should be easy to fix, not hour-long treks through code. It seems to me that *that* is your main problem. Not the fact that strict and warnings aren't put in by the perl interpreter itself, but that perl code is so difficult to debug. Something as simple as requiring variable declarations or initializing variables ought not take hours of debugging, assuming that for the rest, the source works reasonably OK. So, A) a code profiler that can verify use of variables and stick a limited scope onto every variable, plus optionaly initializing variables to '' or 0, that might be handy at times. B) perl's error messages could be somewhat more helpful. If you have a here doc with 30 lines of interpolated pure text, it's extremely annoying that perl will only point you to this data block (actually to the line containign the "<<"), and just say "use of uninitialized value" without saying *which* variable it is talking about. But, this has been brought of on the perl6 lists a few times already. All this could help strictifying and warn-proofing otherwise properly working modules, in say, oh, five minutes. -- Bart.