Perl Medic: Transforming Legacy Code

Chapter 11. A Case Study

“This cute mild curry uses 100% Japanese apple and cheerful hamster.”

— Label on a package of Japanese Ham Monde curry, engrish.com

Let’s put this book’s lessons into practice with an example. I’ll go over the phases of taking over a program that just landed in our In Bin. Space considerations—and not-boring-the-reader considerations—prevent me from covering a large program, so this example will be fairly small, and not egregiously bad to begin with. While it uses a capability—LDAP directory lookup—that you might have little use for, understanding LDAP is not important for understanding how this code is changed, and besides, ...