Always use strict and use warnings in your perl code!

If you have been learning from my Beginner Perl Maven tutorial or in one of my class-room training classes you have already learned this. Unfortunately there are still a few Perl developers who are not aware of the importance of use strict and use warnings.

People who learn Perl on their own, or from co-workers who themselves have not learned the importance of these statement, or by copy-pasting from random examples on the Internet tend to not use either of those.

Even when they use, they might not understand why do they need them.

That's understandable, of course, as in many old tutorials and books they are mentioned only towards the end. If at all. In addition tons of code, both within companies and published on the web was written without these. Even worse, there are some people out there who fight against the use of these tools because "they reduce freedom".

They indeed do. just as helmets stop you from breaking your head.

The small extra cost or inconvenience of using these tools outweighs the value they provide.

So here it is.

In any piece of code, you should always use strict and warnings.

Turn them off only in very restricted areas and only when you really, really need the extra power.

(You'd probably not wear a helmet when you go to the hairdresser, would you.)

With time you will learn how and when you need to turn them off, but for most of us, using them always is a good default.

What are strict and warnings?

They are compiler flags that instruct Perl to behave in a stricter way.

They are there to help you avoid a number of common programming mistakes.

In a separate article you can read about some of the common error messages and warnings you might see.

use warnings

You might have already seen the -w flag on the sh-bang line like this: #!/usr/bin/perl -w.

use warnings, is a "new" and improved version of the -w flag. It has a number of advantages and I'd recommend converting every perl script from the use of -w to the use of the warnings`.

I put the "new" in quotation as it has been added to Perl version 5.6 in 2000. So it's not really new, but unfortunately it is still new to many Perl developers.

The warnings pragmata provides us with lots of run-time warnings that in many cases indicate some kind of a problem or a potential problem.

In general it is good to see these warnings but quite likely you don't want to let end-users see the Perl warnings in their applications. In some cases it might trigger unwanted actions from these users trying to "fix" the warnings. The warning will certainly erode the users confidence in your product.

No one really wants to see all kinds of "error messages" flying around when using any application.

Therefore some people advice against using the warnings pragma in production. They don't want their end-users to see warnings coming from Perl. That's understandable, but there are better ways to deal with the unwanted side effect of the warnings.

See how to capture and save warnings.

If a warning is triggered during execution it indicates some problem. Certainly one could eliminate all the warnings by more careful coding. So I strongly advice always using warnings.

We'll see several ways to deal with the warnings in production code.

Some of the warnings you might see:

use strict

This pragmata has 3 different features. When used as above it turns on all 3 of them. This is the recommended way to use it.

The most visible of the 3 features is the one that requires every lexical variable to be declared by the my or by the our keywords. (There are a few additional ways but for now this should be enough). In case you'd want to turn on this feature alone, you can do this by the use strict 'vars'; statement.

If you have this feature turned on, you'll get a Global symbol requires explicit package name error in case you violate the requirement.

use strict 'refs'; generates runtime error if a symbolic reference was encountered. We'll explain in another place what symbolic references are. When are they useful and how to use them even if we have use strict enabled at the top of our Perl file.

use strict "subs" disables (at compile time) the inappropriate use of barewords. generating error such as Bareword not allowed while "strict subs" in use.

In practical term it means you need to put your strings within double or single quotes.

"Foo"       # good
'Bar'       # good
Baz         # not good

Avoid warnings

One of the ways to avoid the warnings is to make your code more bullet proof. Every place where a warning might happen write more code that will check the specific conditions and set default values or execute the appropriate code that will avoid warnings.

This of course assumes that you already know where the warnings might occur. It might be a good practice, but it requires a lot more code and discipline.

Not necessarily the perl way to develop an application.

Certainly not something you can easily do to an existing application.

splain and diagnostics

If we get warnings from the code that are unclear, we can ask perl to explain them more in detail by including use diagnostics; in the code, or by using the splain command line tool.

Fatal warnings

The following call turns all warnings to be exceptions. This might not be a good idea in production code, but during development it forces you and your team to clean up the warnings very quickly.

use warnings FATAL => 'all';