Re: kanjidic parser in Perl?

David Alexander Ranvig wrote: 
"John J. Chew, III" <jjchew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

| > sub kdic::parse_entry
| | sub parse_entry ($) {
| | Always use prototypes.

I believe this advice to be counterproductive.

Tom Christiansen once posted a nice write-up of "prototypes" in perl: 

Thanks for posting that.  His main beef with prototypes is that
they give programmers a false sense of security, because they
only catch argument type and number errors under some circumstances
and not others.

I should have suggested to Ben in my first message, as I did in my
second, that he make a point of including prototyped sub declarations
at the beginning of each file.  Doing so solves one of Tom's problems
by ensuring that prototype checking takes place right from the start
of the file, including uses of the sub before it is defined.

I myself have found prototypes to be extremely valuable, and would
no more omit them than I would code without "use strict" or
"use warnings".  It could be because of sloppy coding habits:
I'm almost always wrong as to how many arguments the final version
of a sub is going to want, and I find it convenient to have Perl
tell me when I've been inconsistent.

John
--
John Chew <jjchew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> http://www.poslfit.com
.

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