Re: FormMail.pl: A tiny case in point

>>>>> "Elaine" == Elaine -HFB- Ashton <[email protected]>
>>>>> wrote the following on Mon, 13 Dec 1999 20:37:17 -0600

  Elaine> Now, regardless of whether or not the first one works, both
  Elaine> seem to be a heck of a lot of work, WAY too much work for a
  Elaine> simple $date. Why does he go to all this trouble? I'm not
  Elaine> sure I can answer that. I checked and rechecked why he might
  Elaine> be going through all of this work just to get a formatted
  Elaine> date, e.g. I thought maybe he used the variables elsewhere
  Elaine> for soemthing else...but, nope, he only uses $date and
  Elaine> nothing more.

Ya think *that's* bad. I come in to my current gig at Red Hat with the 
understanding that there was a "very good" Perl programmer who had
done a great deal of work earlier in the year, who was planning to
return after resolving some work-visa issues. In some of the code I
was given, I found where the UNIX "date" command was being executed in 
a sub-shell via back-ticks, chop'd, split on / /, then passed in to
functions from Date::Manip, whereupon the resulting value was used to
re-format the date slightly differently.

So, it was probably Y2K clean, but can you beat backtick-execution,
spurious use of Date::Manip, all to generate a string that could have
been assembled with sprintf and localtime? :-)

Randy
--
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Randy J. Ray                                                    [email protected]
Campbell, CA                                                      [email protected]
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