strict to porter - How use strict made me a perl5-porter
H.Merijn Brand <h.m.brand@hccnet.nl>
Report generation, format, perl-guts, perl5-porter
Where perl has proven its usability in data crunching and report generation, when you hit a problem that deals with gray areas in the perl language that no-one knows about or doesn't seem to care about, you're on your own.
I hit a bug when using format that was exposed only
after converting my script to be use strict safe, and was
forced to delve into the perl guts myself, cause nobody
else did.
Being faced with an apparent simple problem of converting a list of plain data to a report showing the wanted parts on the right spots, where - when starting the project of using perl - another report generator was used to do the job, perl seems to be the right choice indeed.
Having only some perl4 experience at the time, I was stunned with the way perl5 was able to diminish my RPT script from over 1500 lines to less than 50 lines in perl5 just by using symbolic references.
The solution worked so well that the original approach using RPT was dropped as soon as all script were converted to use perl. Soon after the 50 line script grew to support footers and a lot more that we wanted in there for years.
Then, after learning how to use perl5 to the better,
almost all scripts we created so far (except perl4 with
embedded database support) were converted to be -w and
use strict; safe. That meant that
format A01 = @<<<<<<< $e081110 .
should be converted to
format A01 =
@<<<<<<<
$e[8]{1110}
.
both logical and understandable. Then perl did BOOM. The
script wouldn't even compile anymore, nor would perl -c
give any hints why ...
The talk will deal with why the symbolic links were chosen
in the first place, what the impact of use strict; was
to the script, and eventually made me find the location in
the perl guts that made perl barf.