At 03:07 PM 8/4/00 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 04, 2000 at 11:37:30AM -0700, Peter Scott wrote:
> > > It would not be "you need to rebuild your perl", but "the
> administrator of
> > > this site does not allow unstrict programming by default."
>
>It's a stupid idea.
>
>OK, my admin has decided not to allow unstrict programming. Then I
>get a program from somewhere and it has some lines in it that look
>like
>
> if (ref $foo eq HASH) {
> ...
> }
And if someone working for you turned in that code you would respond how?
>and now my program won't run and it can't be made to run. Why not?
The proposal you're quoting was that strict be on by default, not that it
couldn't be turned off. That was another proposal I made, and it was for
sites that do things very, well, strictly. It wouldn't affect your
programs; you don't have to work for such a site.
>Because my admin decided, on my behalf, that it is too dangerous to
>have a program on the system which might someday do the wrong thing if
>some hypothetical programmer were to someday modify it to have a
>subroutine named HASH. Oh. Why is it too dangerous? I don't know, I
>guess because if it were modified in that way, it might then have a
>bug. A BUG! In SOFTWARE! On MY SYSTEM! A program on MY SYSTEM
>MIGHT HAVE A BUG!!!!!! CALL IN THE NATIONAL GUARD!!!
Yes, programs often have bugs. So we should not allow people ways to make
them harder to occur? Why do we have "use strict" in the first place?
>Never mind that I can download a million buggy programs in Perl, and a
>million other buggy programs in a thousand other languages, and run
>them to my heart's content. This one program with a bareword string
>must be forbidden. Even if it perfectly bug-free today, it might
>someday *acquire* a bug, so it must be illegal.
>
>Duh.
>
>It does not make sense to allow the site administrator to dictate tiny
>stylistic details in the program source code. How would you feel
>about a compile-time option that let the admin specify that programs
>will not be run unless they are properly indented?
It exists. It's called Python, and quite a few people already use it, not
that I intend to join them. If I submitted a proposal to do that to Perl I
would expect a response that had something to do with that. But I haven't.
--
Peter Scott
Pacific Systems Design Technologies
