At 03:21 PM 5/25/00 -0500, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:

I think part of it is that -w and use strict are not defaults. I am appalled at how much code is posted that would break them, often by Important Perl People.

I teach my beginners what I call 'Safe Perl' - always use -w and strict, don't even bother telling them the whole raft of stuff they'd need to know without them. In fact just telling them "when you use getopts you need this piece of magic called 'use vars' which we may explain in a future class" is a definite win. I tell people that I may one day have a class for teaching the stuff that they'd need to know to understand and maintain poorly-written scripts from other people; but in the interim they're better off telling the authors to make them -w and strict clean, unless they want to learn it on their own.

Got a great kudo for this when a friend was telling me about a mutual friend who knew some Perl before my classes, was working with him and he said, "Okay, this isn't the way Peter would do it, but here..." and it failed... followed the principles I taught and it worked...