Perl Best Practices

Perl Best Practices is a programming book focusing on standard practices for Perl coding style, encouraging the development of maintainable source code.[1][2][3] It was written by Damian Conway and published by O'Reilly.

Perl Best Practices

But if you're serious about your profession, intuition isn't enough. Perl Best Practices author Damian Conway explains that rules, conventions, standards, and practices not only help programmers communicate and coordinate with one another, they also provide a reliable framework for thinking about problems, and a common language for expressing solutions. This is especially critical in Perl, because the language is designed to offer many ways to accomplish the same task, and consequently it supports many incompatible dialects.

With a good dose of Aussie humor, Dr. Conway (familiar to many in the Perl community) offers 256 guidelines on the art of coding to help you write better Perl code--in fact, the best Perl code you possibly can. The guidelines cover code layout, naming conventions, choice of data and control structures, program decomposition, interface design and implementation, modularity, object orientation, error handling, testing, and debugging.

They're designed to work together to produce code that is clear, robust, efficient, maintainable, and concise, but Dr. Conway doesn't pretend that this is the one true universal and unequivocal set of best practices. Instead, Perl Best Practices offers coherent and widely applicable suggestions based on real-world experience of how code is actually written, rather than on someone's ivory-tower theories on howsoftware ought to be created.

"Perl Best Practices will be the next big important book in the evolution of Perl. The ideas and practices Damian lays down will help bring Perl out from under the embarrassing heading of "scripting languages". Many of us have known Perl is a real programming language, worthy of all the tasks normally delegated to Java and C++. With Perl Best Practices, Damian shows specifically how and why, so everyone else can see, too."-- Andy Lester

Of course, the specific details that your templates provide may vary from those shown here, according to your other coding practices. The most likely variation will be in the license and copyright, but you may also have specific in-house conventions regarding version numbering, the grammar of diagnostic messages, or the attribution of authorship.

What is the best practice here? Should you use classic Kernighan and Ritchie style? Or go with BSD code formatting? Or adopt the layout scheme specified by the GNU project? Or conform to the Slashcode coding guidelines?

Adopting a coherently designed approach to code layout, and then applying that approach consistently across all your coding, is fundamental to best-practice programming. Good layout can improve the readability of a program, help detect errors within it, and make the structure of your code much easier to comprehend. Layout matters.

There is now an excellent code formatter available for Perl: perltidy. It provides an extensive range of user-configurable options for indenting, block delimiter positioning, column-like alignment, and comment positioning.

Especially in the situation where we give them a perl script (vs. an exe) they can easily see how you do the encryption (and the hardcoded key)...which is why you should allow the option to use a keyfile (that can be protected by filesystem permissions) as well.

I just started learning perl, I came to know that, constant are treated as subroutines in perl. I wonder then why the use of constants can be a good practice if everytime, it is making subroutine call and CPU needs to use stack/jump instruction?

In the current implementation, scalar constants are actually inlinable subroutines. As of version 5.004 of Perl, the appropriate scalar constant is inserted directly in place of some subroutine calls, thereby saving the overhead of a subroutine call. See Constant Functions in perlsub for details about how and when this happens.

Perltidy reads a perl script and writes an indented, reformatted script. The formatting process involves converting the script into a string of tokens, removing any non-essential whitespace, and then rewriting the string of tokens with whitespace using whatever rules are specified, or defaults. This happens in a series of operations which can be controlled with the parameters described in this document.

Perltidy can produce output on either of two modes, depending on the existence of an -html flag. Without this flag, the output is passed through a formatter. The default formatting tries to follow the recommendations in perlstyle(1), but it can be controlled in detail with numerous input parameters, which are described in "FORMATTING OPTIONS".

This will produce a file somefile.pl.tdy containing the script reformatted using the default options, which approximate the style suggested in perlstyle(1). The source file somefile.pl is unchanged.

Execute perltidy on all .pl files in the current directory with the default options. The output will be in files with an appended .tdy extension. For any file with an error, there will be a file with extension .ERR.

Execute perltidy on file somefile.pl, with 3 columns for each level of indentation (-i=3) instead of the default 4 columns. There will not be any tabs in the reformatted script, except for any which already exist in comments, pod documents, quotes, and here documents. Output will be somefile.pl.tdy.

If perltidy detects an error when processing file somefile.pl, its default behavior is to write error messages to file somefile.pl.ERR. Use -se to cause all error messages to be sent to the standard error output stream instead. This directive may be negated with -nse. Thus, you may place -se in a .perltidyrc and override it when desired with -nse on the command line.

When perltidy creates a filename for an output file, by default it merely appends an extension to the path and basename of the input file. This parameter causes the path to be changed to path instead.

In particular, if you want to use both the -b flag and the -pbp (--perl-best-practices) flag, then you must put a -nst flag after the -pbp flag because it contains a -st flag as one of its components, which means that output will go to the standard output stream.

Ignore any .perltidyrc command file. Normally, perltidy looks first in your current directory for a .perltidyrc file of parameters. (The format is described below). If it finds one, it applies those options to the initial default values, and then it applies any that have been defined on the command line. If no .perltidyrc file is found, it looks for one in your home directory.

To simplify testing and switching .perltidyrc files, this command may be used to specify a configuration file which will override the default name of .perltidyrc. There must not be a space on either side of the '=' sign. For example, the line

A pathname begins with three dots, e.g. ".../.perltidyrc", indicates that the file should be searched for starting in the current directory and working upwards. This makes it easier to have multiple projects each with their own .perltidyrc in their root directories.

Force perltidy to process binary files. To avoid producing excessive error messages, perltidy skips files identified by the system as non-text. However, valid perl scripts containing binary data may sometimes be identified as non-text, and this flag forces perltidy to process them.

This flag asserts that the input and output code streams are identical, or in other words that the input code is already 'tidy' according to the formatting parameters. If this is not the case, an error message noting this is produced. This error message will cause the process to return a non-zero exit code. The test for this is made by comparing an MD5 hash value for the input and output code streams. This flag has no other effect on the functioning of perltidy. This might be useful for certain code maintenance operations. Note: you will not see this message if you have error messages turned off with the -quiet flag.

This flag asserts that the input and output code streams are different, or in other words that the input code is 'untidy' according to the formatting parameters. If this is not the case, an error message noting this is produced. This flag has no other effect on the functioning of perltidy.

This flag disables all formatting and causes the input to be copied unchanged to the output except for possible changes in line ending characters and any pre- and post-filters. This can be useful in conjunction with a hierarchical set of .perltidyrc files to avoid unwanted code tidying. See also "Skipping Selected Sections of Code" for a way to avoid tidying specific sections of code.

A problem arises using a fixed maximum line length with very deeply nested code and data structures because eventually the amount of leading whitespace used for indicating indentation takes up most or all of the available line width, leaving little or no space for the actual code or data. One solution is to use a very long line length. Another solution is to use the -vmll flag, which basically tells perltidy to ignore leading whitespace when measuring the line length.

Except for possibly introducing tab indentation characters, as outlined below, perltidy does not introduce any tab characters into your file, and it removes any tabs from the code (unless requested not to do so with -fws). If you have any tabs in your comments, quotes, or here-documents, they will remain.

If the first line of code passed to perltidy contains leading tabs but no tab scheme is specified for the output stream then perltidy must guess how many spaces correspond to each leading tab. This number of spaces n corresponding to each leading tab of the input stream may be specified with -dt=n. The default is n=8. 041b061a72