Re: Whimsical Question

Ryan Frantz wrote:

I've been coding Perl for about 18 months now and every time I see '$_'
I immediately understand its use in the context of the code

I tend to avoid $_ these days, so I'm not confronted with the question
of what to call it.

If you get a copy of Damian Conway's "Perl Best Practices" (highly
recommended) you will see this bit of wisdom (bottom of page 105):

From a readability standpoint, $_ is a terrible name for a variable,
especially for an iterator variable. It conveys nothing about the
nature or purpose of the values stores...

That's a good point. I can't really think of a good reason to ever use
$_ except that it saves the coder a few keystrokes. So, for production
code, I've adopted the practice of always using named lexical
variables, which improves readability and robustness.

But, FWIW, Damian calls the thing "dollar-underscore"

--
http://DavidFilmer.com

.

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