Style

Have you ever had to maintain code like this?

The mixed-case-for-words is called camelCase in the Perl world, and it's generally frowned upon because it makes reading code difficult.

    my $variable_that_contains_data =

warnings & strict

For any program you expect to maintain, reuse, or distribute (that is, for any program), you should have the following lines of code:

Although, if your Perl is older than 5.6, you need to do this instead:

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
 
    use strict;

Enabling makes Perl complain even more verbosely, but unlike , these complaints are not fatal under ordinary circumstances.

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    $a + 0; # void context warning
            # name used once warning
            # undef warning
    print "program continued\n"; # prints

If you want to be fatal, tell it so: