Re: Uninitialized value warnings should die (was Re: RFC 212 (v1) Make length(@array) work)

Nathan Wiger writes:
>    print "Welcome back, $first $middle $last!\n";
> 
> My question: What good is this warning in most contexts, anyways?
> Really. Honestly. If you cared about the value, you would already be
> checking it, right? Probably with something like this:
> 
>    die "Fatal: Can't continue with \$var unset!" unless $var;

Tee hee!  The point of the warning is to tell you that you should be
checking it and aren't.  You're assuming the variable has a value,
because you are treating it like a string.  But the variable doesn't
have a value.  This is probably an error.

Either you didn't give the variable a value (for example, because it's
9-5 you didn't call the "authorize user" subroutine that would have
set the $username variable) or you called a function to get a value
for the variable, but the function returned undef to indicate an error
and you never checked for that.  Both of these situations are almost
always errors.

Saying:
 
  my $middle = '';

if you want to allow for the situation where there isn't a middle
initial given isn't that much of a hardship, especially when you
consider all the things that might go wrong.

I've never had an "uninitialized value" warning that wasn't my own
damn fault.  At least, not that I can remember.

Nat