Perl Debugged

1.3. Know the Environment

Knowledge of a language includes experience with the practical meanings of errors in different environments. If a Unix program returns the error segmentation fault (those of you on other systems may experience this variously as ABEND, %SYSTEM-F-ACCVIO, or your machine freezing), an experienced programmer will first suspect a memory problem, often the result of a read or write to an array beyond the array bounds. Another Unix error response, bus error, often occurs when a subroutine or function call has an improper argument list. Efficient error identification accompanies experience. This book tries to encapsulate experience with errors made writing Perl programs.