dakenah johnson wrote: > Hi all, > I am a novice to perl. I find Perl very interesting and I am studying how to > write and compile perl scripts without syntax and compilation errors. I need > heads up on how. > > thanks, > DJ
Hi DJ, You might want to re-think your emphasis here. Of ocurse, you need to eliminate these errors, but not by suppression. For instance, you can reduce the number of error messages vastly simply by removing the use strict; statement. Your code may then compile without explicit error. Unfortunately there is a good chance that it will not be doing what you think it is, or what you want. These errors, or to be more specific, the rules whose violation invokes the errors, are your friends. They will generally indicate an underlying logic error. If you suppress the error, the program will go ahead and run on broken logic. That's the sort of convenience that could toast a system. Perl is a syntactically tricky languiage. Because many of the operators are highly context-sensitive, a formulation that works very well in one place will not work at all in another. You definitely should have a basic reference. Randal Schartz's "Learning Perl" is considered the essential starter text, but has one major shortcoming in that it seems to constantly make external reference to Larry Wall's Programming Perl. This strikes me as a sort of sweetheart deal. As the others have told you, use strict and use warnings are a good place to start. These will force you to predeclare the scope and containment capacity of your variables. I personally would prefer that data type was also explicitly declared, but that's not the way Perl works. Most Perl users prefer the features that allow us to use the same variable to represent both a numerical value and its representation. As for me, it gives me the Willies--but I still use it. I suggest that you focus first on the logic--what you want to accomplish, what steps must be taken to do it, what values must be stored, accessed or manipulated. The language and its syntax are only a medium for communicating that logic, so don't worry about syntax errors until you see them. Then work on specific examples, since there is no blanket recipe for preventing them. One other tip--when you do start testing scripts, and you need jhelp with compiler errors, please mark the line numbers the error messages refer to. You may have to change code editors to find one that shows line numbers, but they are the most useful debugging information available to you or those helping you. Joseph -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
