Re: Inline/gtk2-perl problem solved / patch to Inline::denter.pm

[Ken Williams]

On Thursday, November 14, 2002, at 01:04  PM, Matthew O. Persico wrote:

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002 11:49:56 +1100, Ken Williams wrote:

Incidentally, I'd just write these as

local $_ = $o->{lines}[0];

As explained, you usually use $_ as assigned by Perl in for, map
,grep. From these snippets, it seems like $_ is being assigned and
used because:

1) being too lazy (bad lazy) to use a 'my' 2) misguidedly think that
not using 'my' saves a significant number of cycles 3) being too
cute.

Actually, in some of them it looks like it's so that $_ can be used as the implicit target of a regular expression. I do that sometimes, particularly when writing something like a string tokenizer, because it reduces clutter quite a bit:

local $_ = shift();
if ( /^foo/gc ) {
....
} elsif ( /^bar/gc ) {
....
} elsif ( /^baz/gc ) {
....
} elsif ( /^quux/gc ) {
....
}

But yeah, if you're using $_ as a regular variable simply because perl lets you use it without declaring it, you're asking for trouble.

-Ken