Re: "static" declaration

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

Kobayasi: I didn't mean my post to be about Perl-style. I perfectly
understand and do use strict (and the various perldiag options).
I meant to say that w/ large bodies of existing code if you use "good"
tools/IDE's that often rely on providing you with "all" errors,
starting off with the strictest levels of error checking might not be
a good idea.

And yes, our experience with perl -- since we generate dynamic sql,
and play gnarly games with cursors -- is likely not to match
yours. Our codebases are also typically much larger (we do write one
liners like others here, but we also use light-weight languages for
other larger tasks) .. we are probably one of the few
commercial ISV's that still maintain oh.. around a million lines of
Lisp, for example. 

Please read the original thread.. Dan was asking about whether or not
declaring variables implicitly and at any point causes more grief than
it is worth. I tend to agree. Use strict and other similar bandaids do
help. 

    And, what is your real problem/issue?

    (1) IDE (VisualAge)'s weak support for Perl.
    (2) Poorly designed codebases you encounterd.
    (3) Perl's weakness of static checking.

All of the above.. and more. But they are not "my" problems/issues. I
am not a language designer these days -- so I think of these as
"their" (language designers/tool vendors) problems. All I care about
is reducing the bug metrics that I see in codebases we have to
maintain -- since it affects our bottom line. (VisualAge is not a Perl
tool -- it's a Java tool. If you don't understand the reference or why
they are related, never mind. It doesn't matter.)