"use strict" makes us forget that Perl used to be worse

2014-11-04

What does “int a, b, c” do in Perl? Lots of people want to say that this won’t even compile. There’s even a comment on the StackOverflow post accusing OP of posting uncompilable code.

It is compilable. Without use strict, perl will accept damn near anything. What’s interesting here is that the immediate response by many people is that it’s invalid code. That was my initial reaction, and it took me a second to remind myself.

It’s interesting that we’re all so conditioned to use strict that we forgot how Perl looks without it. This is probably a good thing.