On Oct 30, 5:24 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Jenda Krynicky) wrote: > On 30 Oct 2007 at 10:22, Paul Lalli wrote: > > > > > > > On Oct 30, 11:15 am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Chas. Owens) wrote: > > > On 10/30/07, Kaushal Shriyan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > snip> Whats the exact purpose of use strict > > > > snip > > > > The strict pragma has three effects (unless modified by arguments): > > > 1. most variables must be declared (there are some exceptions) > > > This is a common misperception. use strict 'vars' in fact does not > > require anything to be declared. All it requires is that global > > variables must be fully qualified. You cannot use the short-name of > > globals that belong to the current package. > > > <snipped> > > > With strict enabled, the only way to use a short-name of a variable is > > to declare a lexical of that name (the right choice) using 'my', or to > > disable strict 'vars' on a variable-by-variable case using 'our' (the > > wrong choice). This is what leads people to assert "use strict forces > > you to declare your variables". > > Technicaly you are right, but generally it's better to present use > strict 'vars' as a way to force oneself to declare variables.
I would agree, if the resulting error message was something along the lines of "Undeclared variable $foo while using strict", but it's not. The error message is "global variable $foo must be fully qualified while using strict vars". When a new Perl programmer sees that message, if all they know about using strict is that it "forces you to declare your variables", this error message is meaningless, and frequently leads to the wrong solution. They either fully qualify it, or they stick an 'our' in front of it. Tell newbies what 'strict' actually does, and the error message makes sense, and they know what they did wrong and how to fix it. Paul Lalli -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://learn.perl.org/
