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Revision: 1.7
Committed: Fri Jan 14 06:46:29 2011 UTC (13 years, 4 months ago) by root
Content type: text/plain
Branch: MAIN
CVS Tags: rel-3_4
Changes since 1.6: +12 -6 lines
Log Message:
3.4

File Contents

# Content
1 #! perl-000
2
3 open STDOUT, ">$ARGV[0]~"
4 or die "$ARGV[0]~: $!";
5
6 our $WARN;
7 our $H;
8
9 BEGIN {
10 $H = $^H;
11 $WARN = ${^WARNING_BITS};
12 }
13
14 use utf8;
15 use strict qw(subs vars);
16
17 no warnings;
18 use warnings qw(FATAL closed threads internal debugging pack malloc portable prototype
19 inplace io pipe unpack deprecated glob digit printf
20 layer reserved taint closure semicolon);
21 no warnings qw(exec newline unopened);
22
23 BEGIN {
24 $H = $^H & ~$H;
25 $WARN = ${^WARNING_BITS} & ~$WARN;
26 }
27
28 while (<DATA>) {
29 if (/^IMPORT/) {
30 print " # use warnings\n";
31 printf " \${^WARNING_BITS} ^= \${^WARNING_BITS} ^ \"%s\";\n",
32 join "", map "\\x$_", unpack "(H2)*", $WARN;
33 print " # use strict, use utf8;\n";
34 printf " \$^H |= 0x%x;\n", $H;
35 } else {
36 print;
37 }
38 }
39
40 close STDOUT;
41 rename "$ARGV[0]~", $ARGV[0];
42
43 __DATA__
44
45 =head1 NAME
46
47 common::sense - save a tree AND a kitten, use common::sense!
48
49 =head1 SYNOPSIS
50
51 use common::sense;
52
53 # supposed to be the same, with much lower memory usage, as:
54 #
55 # use utf8;
56 # use strict qw(vars subs);
57 # use feature qw(say state switch);
58 # no warnings;
59 # use warnings qw(FATAL closed threads internal debugging pack
60 # portable prototype inplace io pipe unpack malloc
61 # deprecated glob digit printf layer
62 # reserved taint closure semicolon);
63 # no warnings qw(exec newline unopened);
64
65
66 =head1 DESCRIPTION
67
68 “Nothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks
69 he needs more of it than he already has.”
70
71 – René Descartes
72
73 This module implements some sane defaults for Perl programs, as defined by
74 two typical (or not so typical - use your common sense) specimens of Perl
75 coders. In fact, after working out details on which warnings and strict
76 modes to enable and make fatal, we found that we (and our code written so
77 far, and others) fully agree on every option, even though we never used
78 warnings before, so it seems this module indeed reflects a "common" sense
79 among some long-time Perl coders.
80
81 The basic philosophy behind the choices made in common::sense can be
82 summarised as: "enforcing strict policies to catch as many bugs as
83 possible, while at the same time, not limiting the expressive power
84 available to the programmer".
85
86 Two typical examples of how this philosophy is applied in practise is the
87 handling of uninitialised and malloc warnings:
88
89 =over 4
90
91 =item I<uninitialised>
92
93 C<undef> is a well-defined feature of perl, and enabling warnings for
94 using it rarely catches any bugs, but considerably limits you in what you
95 can do, so uninitialised warnings are disabled.
96
97 =item I<malloc>
98
99 Freeing something twice on the C level is a serious bug, usually causing
100 memory corruption. It often leads to side effects much later in the
101 program and there are no advantages to not reporting this, so malloc
102 warnings are fatal by default.
103
104 =back
105
106 Unfortunately, there is no fine-grained warning control in perl, so often
107 whole groups of useful warnings had to be excluded because of a single
108 useless warning (for example, perl puts an arbitrary limit on the length
109 of text you can match with some regexes before emitting a warning, making
110 the whole C<regexp> category useless).
111
112 What follows is a more thorough discussion of what this module does,
113 and why it does it, and what the advantages (and disadvantages) of this
114 approach are.
115
116 =head1 RATIONALE
117
118 =over 4
119
120 =item use utf8
121
122 While it's not common sense to write your programs in UTF-8, it's quickly
123 becoming the most common encoding, is the designated future default
124 encoding for perl sources, and the most convenient encoding available
125 (you can do really nice quoting tricks...). Experience has shown that our
126 programs were either all pure ascii or utf-8, both of which will stay the
127 same.
128
129 There are few drawbacks to enabling UTF-8 source code by default (mainly
130 some speed hits due to bugs in older versions of perl), so this module
131 enables UTF-8 source code encoding by default.
132
133
134 =item use strict qw(subs vars)
135
136 Using C<use strict> is definitely common sense, but C<use strict
137 'refs'> definitely overshoots its usefulness. After almost two
138 decades of Perl hacking, we decided that it does more harm than being
139 useful. Specifically, constructs like these:
140
141 @{ $var->[0] }
142
143 Must be written like this (or similarly), when C<use strict 'refs'> is in
144 scope, and C<$var> can legally be C<undef>:
145
146 @{ $var->[0] || [] }
147
148 This is annoying, and doesn't shield against obvious mistakes such as
149 using C<"">, so one would even have to write (at least for the time
150 being):
151
152 @{ defined $var->[0] ? $var->[0] : [] }
153
154 ... which nobody with a bit of common sense would consider
155 writing: clear code is clearly something else.
156
157 Curiously enough, sometimes perl is not so strict, as this works even with
158 C<use strict> in scope:
159
160 for (@{ $var->[0] }) { ...
161
162 If that isn't hypocrisy! And all that from a mere program!
163
164
165 =item use feature qw(say state given)
166
167 We found it annoying that we always have to enable extra features. If
168 something breaks because it didn't anticipate future changes, so be
169 it. 5.10 broke almost all our XS modules and nobody cared either (or at
170 least I know of nobody who really complained about gratuitous changes -
171 as opposed to bugs).
172
173 Few modules that are not actively maintained work with newer versions of
174 Perl, regardless of use feature or not, so a new major perl release means
175 changes to many modules - new keywords are just the tip of the iceberg.
176
177 If your code isn't alive, it's dead, Jim - be an active maintainer.
178
179 But nobody forces you to use those extra features in modules meant for
180 older versions of perl - common::sense of course works there as well.
181 There is also an important other mode where having additional features by
182 default is useful: commandline hacks and internal use scripts: See "much
183 reduced typing", below.
184
185
186 =item no warnings, but a lot of new errors
187
188 Ah, the dreaded warnings. Even worse, the horribly dreaded C<-w>
189 switch: Even though we don't care if other people use warnings (and
190 certainly there are useful ones), a lot of warnings simply go against the
191 spirit of Perl.
192
193 Most prominently, the warnings related to C<undef>. There is nothing wrong
194 with C<undef>: it has well-defined semantics, it is useful, and spitting
195 out warnings you never asked for is just evil.
196
197 The result was that every one of our modules did C<no warnings> in the
198 past, to avoid somebody accidentally using and forcing his bad standards
199 on our code. Of course, this switched off all warnings, even the useful
200 ones. Not a good situation. Really, the C<-w> switch should only enable
201 warnings for the main program only.
202
203 Funnily enough, L<perllexwarn> explicitly mentions C<-w> (and not in a
204 favourable way, calling it outright "wrong"), but standard utilities, such
205 as L<prove>, or MakeMaker when running C<make test>, still enable them
206 blindly.
207
208 For version 2 of common::sense, we finally sat down a few hours and went
209 through I<every single warning message>, identifiying - according to
210 common sense - all the useful ones.
211
212 This resulted in the rather impressive list in the SYNOPSIS. When we
213 weren't sure, we didn't include the warning, so the list might grow in
214 the future (we might have made a mistake, too, so the list might shrink
215 as well).
216
217 Note the presence of C<FATAL> in the list: we do not think that the
218 conditions caught by these warnings are worthy of a warning, we I<insist>
219 that they are worthy of I<stopping> your program, I<instantly>. They are
220 I<bugs>!
221
222 Therefore we consider C<common::sense> to be much stricter than C<use
223 warnings>, which is good if you are into strict things (we are not,
224 actually, but these things tend to be subjective).
225
226 After deciding on the list, we ran the module against all of our code that
227 uses C<common::sense> (that is almost all of our code), and found only one
228 occurence where one of them caused a problem: one of elmex's (unreleased)
229 modules contained:
230
231 $fmt =~ s/([^\s\[]*)\[( [^\]]* )\]/\x0$1\x1$2\x0/xgo;
232
233 We quickly agreed that indeed the code should be changed, even though it
234 happened to do the right thing when the warning was switched off.
235
236
237 =item much reduced typing
238
239 Especially with version 2.0 of common::sense, the amount of boilerplate
240 code you need to add to gte I<this> policy is daunting. Nobody would write
241 this out in throwaway scripts, commandline hacks or in quick internal-use
242 scripts.
243
244 By using common::sense you get a defined set of policies (ours, but maybe
245 yours, too, if you accept them), and they are easy to apply to your
246 scripts: typing C<use common::sense;> is even shorter than C<use warnings;
247 use strict; use feature ...>.
248
249 And you can immediately use the features of your installed perl, which
250 is more difficult in code you release, but not usually an issue for
251 internal-use code (downgrades of your production perl should be rare,
252 right?).
253
254
255 =item mucho reduced memory usage
256
257 Just using all those pragmas mentioned in the SYNOPSIS together wastes
258 <blink>I<< B<776> kilobytes >></blink> of precious memory in my perl, for
259 I<every single perl process using our code>, which on our machines, is a
260 lot. In comparison, this module only uses I<< B<four> >> kilobytes (I even
261 had to write it out so it looks like more) of memory on the same platform.
262
263 The money/time/effort/electricity invested in these gigabytes (probably
264 petabytes globally!) of wasted memory could easily save 42 trees, and a
265 kitten!
266
267 Unfortunately, until everybods applies more common sense, there will still
268 often be modules that pull in the monster pragmas. But one can hope...
269
270 =cut
271
272 package common::sense;
273
274 our $VERSION = '3.4';
275
276 # overload should be included
277
278 sub import {
279 IMPORT
280 # use feature
281 $^H{feature_switch} =
282 $^H{feature_say} =
283 $^H{feature_state} = 1;
284 }
285
286 1;
287
288 =back
289
290 =head1 THERE IS NO 'no common::sense'!!!! !!!! !!
291
292 This module doesn't offer an unimport. First of all, it wastes even more
293 memory, second, and more importantly, who with even a bit of common sense
294 would want no common sense?
295
296 =head1 STABILITY AND FUTURE VERSIONS
297
298 Future versions might change just about everything in this module. We
299 might test our modules and upload new ones working with newer versions of
300 this module, and leave you standing in the rain because we didn't tell
301 you. In fact, we did so when switching from 1.0 to 2.0, which enabled gobs
302 of warnings, and made them FATAL on top.
303
304 Maybe we will load some nifty modules that try to emulate C<say> or so
305 with perls older than 5.10 (this module, of course, should work with older
306 perl versions - supporting 5.8 for example is just common sense at this
307 time. Maybe not in the future, but of course you can trust our common
308 sense to be consistent with, uhm, our opinion).
309
310 =head1 WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAD TO SAY ABOUT THIS MODULE
311
312 apeiron
313
314 "... wow"
315 "I hope common::sense is a joke."
316
317 crab
318
319 "i wonder how it would be if joerg schilling wrote perl modules."
320
321 Adam Kennedy
322
323 "Very interesting, efficient, and potentially something I'd use all the time."
324 [...]
325 "So no common::sense for me, alas."
326
327 H.Merijn Brand
328
329 "Just one more reason to drop JSON::XS from my distribution list"
330
331 Pista Palo
332
333 "Something in short supply these days..."
334
335 Steffen Schwigon
336
337 "This module is quite for sure *not* just a repetition of all the other
338 'use strict, use warnings'-approaches, and it's also not the opposite.
339 [...] And for its chosen middle-way it's also not the worst name ever.
340 And everything is documented."
341
342 BKB
343
344 "[Deleted - thanks to Steffen Schwigon for pointing out this review was
345 in error.]"
346
347 Somni
348
349 "the arrogance of the guy"
350 "I swear he tacked somenoe else's name onto the module
351 just so he could use the royal 'we' in the documentation"
352
353 Anonymous Monk
354
355 "You just gotta love this thing, its got META.json!!!"
356
357 dngor
358
359 "Heh. '"<elmex at ta-sa.org>"' The quotes are semantic
360 distancing from that e-mail address."
361
362 Jerad Pierce
363
364 "Awful name (not a proper pragma), and the SYNOPSIS doesn't tell you
365 anything either. Nor is it clear what features have to do with "common
366 sense" or discipline."
367
368 acme
369
370 "THERE IS NO 'no common::sense'!!!! !!!! !!"
371
372 apeiron (meta-comment about us commenting^Wquoting his comment)
373
374 "How about quoting this: get a clue, you fucktarded amoeba."
375
376 quanth
377
378 "common sense is beautiful, json::xs is fast, Anyevent, EV are fast and
379 furious. I love mlehmannware ;)"
380
381 apeiron
382
383 "... it's mlehmann's view of what common sense is. His view of common
384 sense is certainly uncommon, insofar as anyone with a clue disagrees
385 with him."
386
387 apeiron (another meta-comment)
388
389 "apeiron wonders if his little informant is here to steal more quotes"
390
391 ew73
392
393 "... I never got past the SYNOPSIS before calling it shit."
394 [...]
395 How come no one ever quotes me. :("
396
397 =head1 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
398
399 Or frequently-come-up confusions.
400
401 =over 4
402
403 =item Is this module meant to be serious?
404
405 Yes, we would have put it under the C<Acme::> namespace otherwise.
406
407 =item But the manpage is written in a funny/stupid/... way?
408
409 This was meant to make it clear that our common sense is a subjective
410 thing and other people can use their own notions, taking the steam out
411 of anybody who might be offended (as some people are always offended no
412 matter what you do).
413
414 This was a failure.
415
416 But we hope the manpage still is somewhat entertaining even though it
417 explains boring rationale.
418
419 =item Why do you impose your conventions on my code?
420
421 For some reason people keep thinking that C<common::sense> imposes
422 process-wide limits, even though the SYNOPSIS makes it clear that it works
423 like other similar modules - i.e. only within the scope that C<use>s them.
424
425 So, no, we don't - nobody is forced to use this module, and using a module
426 that relies on common::sense does not impose anything on you.
427
428 =item Why do you think only your notion of common::sense is valid?
429
430 Well, we don't, and have clearly written this in the documentation to
431 every single release. We were just faster than anybody else w.r.t. to
432 grabbing the namespace.
433
434 =item But everybody knows that you have to use strict and use warnings,
435 why do you disable them?
436
437 Well, we don't do this either - we selectively disagree with the
438 usefulness of some warnings over others. This module is aimed at
439 experienced Perl programmers, not people migrating from other languages
440 who might be surprised about stuff such as C<undef>. On the other hand,
441 this does not exclude the usefulness of this module for total newbies, due
442 to its strictness in enforcing policy, while at the same time not limiting
443 the expressive power of perl.
444
445 This module is considerably I<more> strict than the canonical C<use
446 strict; use warnings>, as it makes all its warnings fatal in nature, so
447 you can not get away with as many things as with the canonical approach.
448
449 This was not implemented in version 1.0 because of the daunting number
450 of warning categories and the difficulty in getting exactly the set of
451 warnings you wish (i.e. look at the SYNOPSIS in how complicated it is to
452 get a specific set of warnings - it is not reasonable to put this into
453 every module, the maintenance effort would be enourmous).
454
455 =item But many modules C<use strict> or C<use warnings>, so the memory
456 savings do not apply?
457
458 I suddenly feel sad...
459
460 But yes, that's true. Fortunately C<common::sense> still uses only a
461 miniscule amount of RAM.
462
463 =item But it adds another dependency to your modules!
464
465 It's a fact, yeah. But it's trivial to install, most popular modules have
466 many more dependencies and we consider dependencies a good thing - it
467 leads to better APIs, more thought about interworking of modules and so
468 on.
469
470 =item Why do you use JSON and not YAML for your META.yml?
471
472 This is not true - YAML supports a large subset of JSON, and this subset
473 is what META.yml is written in, so it would be correct to say "the
474 META.yml is written in a common subset of YAML and JSON".
475
476 The META.yml follows the YAML, JSON and META.yml specifications, and is
477 correctly parsed by CPAN, so if you have trouble with it, the problem is
478 likely on your side.
479
480 =item But! But!
481
482 Yeah, we know.
483
484 =back
485
486 =head1 AUTHOR
487
488 Marc Lehmann <schmorp@schmorp.de>
489 http://home.schmorp.de/
490
491 Robin Redeker, "<elmex at ta-sa.org>".
492
493 =cut
494