On 07/02/2014 01:11, Sam wrote:
The oreilly "Learning Perl" teaches one to use the ampersand when
calling subroutines, which most perl'ers will disagree with. I did it
for years with out even questioning it until it bit me because I had
read that book.
I believe that most of the recent dislike of Perl comes from its use of
sigils for everything. The original design was a result of Larry Wall's
linguistic background, so his sigils were a way of expressing the
plurality of value in the same way that we add a suffix `s` to most
nouns to show a plural, or `ly` do denote an adverb.
It's a nice idea, and is very comfortable once you are used to it, but
it can look kinda crazy when you're used to bare variable names. I
believe it's much nicer than the awful Hungarian Notation, which comes
up with stuff like `arru16Ids` for an array of unsigned sixteen-bit
identifiers.
The move to object-orientation in Perl 5 rather messed this idea up, as
it didn't make sense to call methods as `&{ $object->method }`, so the
requirement for the ampersand was dropped in ordinary subroutine calls
as well as method calls.
I dislike Learning Perl for other reasons: paticularly that, despite
being a senior partner of Stonehenge, on whose courses the book is
based, doesn't seem to comprehend the problems that people have with
learning and understanding Perl.
However, later editions of Learning Perl include this section
http://hellolixian.tumblr.com/post/5569953537/omitting-the-ampersand
that goes some way to explaining the circumstances where an ampersand is
necessary.
My rule of thumb is that you should use the ampersand if you are
treating the subroutine as an item of data: you should drop it if you
are just calling it as a function.
Rob
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