Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Maintainer Efficiency

Code that you (or your friends) are going to use and work on for a long time into the future deserves more attention. Substitute some short-term gains for much better long-term benefits.

• Don’t use defaults.

• Use foreach to mean foreach.

• Use meaningful loop labels with next and last.

• Use meaningful variable names.

• Use meaningful subroutine names.

• Put the important thing first on the line using and, or, and statement modifiers (like exit if $done).

• Close your files as soon as you’re done with them.

• Use packages, modules, and classes to hide your implementation details.

• Make a sensible API.

• Pass arguments as subroutine parameters.

• Name your subroutine parameters using my.

• Parenthesize for clarity.

• Put in lots of (useful) comments.

• Include embedded pod documentation.

• use warnings.

• use strict.

• Write tests and get good test coverage (see Chapter 19).