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sense(3pm)	      User Contributed Perl Documentation	    sense(3pm)

NAME
       common::sense - save a tree AND a kitten, use common::sense!

SYNOPSIS
	use common::sense;

	# supposed to be the same, with much lower memory usage, as:
	#
	# use utf8;
	# use strict qw(vars subs);
	# use feature qw(say state switch);
	# no warnings;
	# use warnings qw(FATAL closed threads internal debugging pack
	#		  portable prototype inplace io pipe unpack malloc
	#		  deprecated glob digit printf layer
	#		  reserved taint closure semicolon);
	# no warnings qw(exec newline unopened);

DESCRIPTION
	  aXXNothing is more fairly distributed than common sense: no one thinks
	  he needs more of it than he already has.aXX

	  aXX RenA~X Descartes

       This module implements some sane defaults for Perl programs, as defined
       by two typical (or not so typical - use your common sense) specimens of
       Perl coders. In fact, after working out details on which warnings and
       strict modes to enable and make fatal, we found that we (and our code
       written so far, and others) fully agree on every option, even though we
       never used warnings before, so it seems this module indeed reflects a
       "common" sense among some long-time Perl coders.

       The basic philosophy behind the choices made in common::sense can be
       summarised as: "enforcing strict policies to catch as many bugs as
       possible, while at the same time, not limiting the expressive power
       available to the programmer".

       Two typical examples of how this philosophy is applied in practise is
       the handling of uninitialised and malloc warnings:

       uninitialised
	   "undef" is a well-defined feature of perl, and enabling warnings
	   for using it rarely catches any bugs, but considerably limits you
	   in what you can do, so uninitialised warnings are disabled.

       malloc
	   Freeing something twice on the C level is a serious bug, usually
	   causing memory corruption. It often leads to side effects much
	   later in the program and there are no advantages to not reporting
	   this, so malloc warnings are fatal by default.

       Unfortunately, there is no fine-grained warning control in perl, so
       often whole groups of useful warnings had to be excluded because of a
       single useless warning (for example, perl puts an arbitrary limit on
       the length of text you can match with some regexes before emitting a
       warning, making the whole "regexp" category useless).

       What follows is a more thorough discussion of what this module does,
       and why it does it, and what the advantages (and disadvantages) of this
       approach are.

RATIONALE
       use utf8
	   While it's not common sense to write your programs in UTF-8, it's
	   quickly becoming the most common encoding, is the designated future
	   default encoding for perl sources, and the most convenient encoding
	   available (you can do really nice quoting tricks...). Experience
	   has shown that our programs were either all pure ascii or utf-8,
	   both of which will stay the same.

	   There are few drawbacks to enabling UTF-8 source code by default
	   (mainly some speed hits due to bugs in older versions of perl), so
	   this module enables UTF-8 source code encoding by default.

       use strict qw(subs vars)
	   Using "use strict" is definitely common sense, but "use strict
	   'refs'" definitely overshoots its usefulness. After almost two
	   decades of Perl hacking, we decided that it does more harm than
	   being useful. Specifically, constructs like these:

	      @{ $var->[0] }

	   Must be written like this (or similarly), when "use strict 'refs'"
	   is in scope, and $var can legally be "undef":

	      @{ $var->[0] || [] }

	   This is annoying, and doesn't shield against obvious mistakes such
	   as using "", so one would even have to write (at least for the time
	   being):

	      @{ defined $var->[0] ? $var->[0] : [] }

	   ... which nobody with a bit of common sense would consider writing:
	   clear code is clearly something else.

	   Curiously enough, sometimes perl is not so strict, as this works
	   even with "use strict" in scope:

	      for (@{ $var->[0] }) { ...

	   If that isn't hypocrisy! And all that from a mere program!

       use feature qw(say state given)
	   We found it annoying that we always have to enable extra features.
	   If something breaks because it didn't anticipate future changes, so
	   be it. 5.10 broke almost all our XS modules and nobody cared either
	   (or at least I know of nobody who really complained about
	   gratuitous changes - as opposed to bugs).

	   Few modules that are not actively maintained work with newer
	   versions of Perl, regardless of use feature or not, so a new major
	   perl release means changes to many modules - new keywords are just
	   the tip of the iceberg.

	   If your code isn't alive, it's dead, Jim - be an active maintainer.

	   But nobody forces you to use those extra features in modules meant
	   for older versions of perl - common::sense of course works there as
	   well.  There is also an important other mode where having
	   additional features by default is useful: commandline hacks and
	   internal use scripts: See "much reduced typing", below.

       no warnings, but a lot of new errors
	   Ah, the dreaded warnings. Even worse, the horribly dreaded "-w"
	   switch: Even though we don't care if other people use warnings (and
	   certainly there are useful ones), a lot of warnings simply go
	   against the spirit of Perl.

	   Most prominently, the warnings related to "undef". There is nothing
	   wrong with "undef": it has well-defined semantics, it is useful,
	   and spitting out warnings you never asked for is just evil.

	   The result was that every one of our modules did "no warnings" in
	   the past, to avoid somebody accidentally using and forcing his bad
	   standards on our code. Of course, this switched off all warnings,
	   even the useful ones. Not a good situation. Really, the "-w" switch
	   should only enable warnings for the main program only.

	   Funnily enough, perllexwarn explicitly mentions "-w" (and not in a
	   favourable way, calling it outright "wrong"), but standard
	   utilities, such as prove, or MakeMaker when running "make test",
	   still enable them blindly.

	   For version 2 of common::sense, we finally sat down a few hours and
	   went through every single warning message, identifiying - according
	   to common sense - all the useful ones.

	   This resulted in the rather impressive list in the SYNOPSIS. When
	   we weren't sure, we didn't include the warning, so the list might
	   grow in the future (we might have made a mistake, too, so the list
	   might shrink as well).

	   Note the presence of "FATAL" in the list: we do not think that the
	   conditions caught by these warnings are worthy of a warning, we
	   insist that they are worthy of stopping your program, instantly.
	   They are bugs!

	   Therefore we consider "common::sense" to be much stricter than "use
	   warnings", which is good if you are into strict things (we are not,
	   actually, but these things tend to be subjective).

	   After deciding on the list, we ran the module against all of our
	   code that uses "common::sense" (that is almost all of our code),
	   and found only one occurence where one of them caused a problem:
	   one of elmex's (unreleased) modules contained:

	      $fmt =~ s/([^\s\[]*)\[( [^\]]* )\]/\x0$1\x1$2\x0/xgo;

	   We quickly agreed that indeed the code should be changed, even
	   though it happened to do the right thing when the warning was
	   switched off.

       much reduced typing
	   Especially with version 2.0 of common::sense, the amount of
	   boilerplate code you need to add to gte this policy is daunting.
	   Nobody would write this out in throwaway scripts, commandline hacks
	   or in quick internal-use scripts.

	   By using common::sense you get a defined set of policies (ours, but
	   maybe yours, too, if you accept them), and they are easy to apply
	   to your scripts: typing "use common::sense;" is even shorter than
	   "use warnings; use strict; use feature ...".

	   And you can immediately use the features of your installed perl,
	   which is more difficult in code you release, but not usually an
	   issue for internal-use code (downgrades of your production perl
	   should be rare, right?).

       mucho reduced memory usage
	   Just using all those pragmas mentioned in the SYNOPSIS together
	   wastes <blink>776 kilobytes</blink> of precious memory in my perl,
	   for every single perl process using our code, which on our
	   machines, is a lot. In comparison, this module only uses four
	   kilobytes (I even had to write it out so it looks like more) of
	   memory on the same platform.

	   The money/time/effort/electricity invested in these gigabytes
	   (probably petabytes globally!) of wasted memory could easily save
	   42 trees, and a kitten!

	   Unfortunately, until everybods applies more common sense, there
	   will still often be modules that pull in the monster pragmas. But
	   one can hope...

THERE IS NO 'no common::sense'!!!! !!!! !!
       This module doesn't offer an unimport. First of all, it wastes even
       more memory, second, and more importantly, who with even a bit of
       common sense would want no common sense?

STABILITY AND FUTURE VERSIONS
       Future versions might change just about everything in this module. We
       might test our modules and upload new ones working with newer versions
       of this module, and leave you standing in the rain because we didn't
       tell you. In fact, we did so when switching from 1.0 to 2.0, which
       enabled gobs of warnings, and made them FATAL on top.

       Maybe we will load some nifty modules that try to emulate "say" or so
       with perls older than 5.10 (this module, of course, should work with
       older perl versions - supporting 5.8 for example is just common sense
       at this time. Maybe not in the future, but of course you can trust our
       common sense to be consistent with, uhm, our opinion).

WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAD TO SAY ABOUT THIS MODULE
       apeiron

	  "... wow"
	  "I hope common::sense is a joke."

       crab

	  "i wonder how it would be if joerg schilling wrote perl modules."

       Adam Kennedy

	  "Very interesting, efficient, and potentially something I'd use all the time."
	  [...]
	  "So no common::sense for me, alas."

       H.Merijn Brand

	  "Just one more reason to drop JSON::XS from my distribution list"

       Pista Palo

	  "Something in short supply these days..."

       Steffen Schwigon

	  "This module is quite for sure *not* just a repetition of all the other
	  'use strict, use warnings'-approaches, and it's also not the opposite.
	  [...] And for its chosen middle-way it's also not the worst name ever.
	  And everything is documented."

       BKB

	  "[Deleted - thanks to Steffen Schwigon for pointing out this review was
	  in error.]"

       Somni

	  "the arrogance of the guy"
	  "I swear he tacked somenoe else's name onto the module
	  just so he could use the royal 'we' in the documentation"

       Anonymous Monk

	  "You just gotta love this thing, its got META.json!!!"

       dngor

	  "Heh.	 '"<elmex at ta-sa.org>"'  The quotes are semantic
	  distancing from that e-mail address."

       Jerad Pierce

	  "Awful name (not a proper pragma), and the SYNOPSIS doesn't tell you
	  anything either. Nor is it clear what features have to do with "common
	  sense" or discipline."

       acme

	  "THERE IS NO 'no common::sense'!!!! !!!! !!"

       apeiron (meta-comment about us commenting^Wquoting his comment)

	  "How about quoting this: get a clue, you fucktarded amoeba."

       quanth

	  "common sense is beautiful, json::xs is fast, Anyevent, EV are fast and
	  furious. I love mlehmannware ;)"

       apeiron

	  "... it's mlehmann's view of what common sense is. His view of common
	  sense is certainly uncommon, insofar as anyone with a clue disagrees
	  with him."

       apeiron (another meta-comment)

	  "apeiron wonders if his little informant is here to steal more quotes"

       ew73

	  "... I never got past the SYNOPSIS before calling it shit."
	  [...]
	  How come no one ever quotes me. :("

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
       Or frequently-come-up confusions.

       Is this module meant to be serious?
	   Yes, we would have put it under the "Acme::" namespace otherwise.

       But the manpage is written in a funny/stupid/... way?
	   This was meant to make it clear that our common sense is a
	   subjective thing and other people can use their own notions, taking
	   the steam out of anybody who might be offended (as some people are
	   always offended no matter what you do).

	   This was a failure.

	   But we hope the manpage still is somewhat entertaining even though
	   it explains boring rationale.

       Why do you impose your conventions on my code?
	   For some reason people keep thinking that "common::sense" imposes
	   process-wide limits, even though the SYNOPSIS makes it clear that
	   it works like other similar modules - i.e. only within the scope
	   that "use"s them.

	   So, no, we don't - nobody is forced to use this module, and using a
	   module that relies on common::sense does not impose anything on
	   you.

       Why do you think only your notion of common::sense is valid?
	   Well, we don't, and have clearly written this in the documentation
	   to every single release. We were just faster than anybody else
	   w.r.t. to grabbing the namespace.

       But everybody knows that you have to use strict and use warnings, why
       do you disable them?
	   Well, we don't do this either - we selectively disagree with the
	   usefulness of some warnings over others. This module is aimed at
	   experienced Perl programmers, not people migrating from other
	   languages who might be surprised about stuff such as "undef". On
	   the other hand, this does not exclude the usefulness of this module
	   for total newbies, due to its strictness in enforcing policy, while
	   at the same time not limiting the expressive power of perl.

	   This module is considerably more strict than the canonical "use
	   strict; use warnings", as it makes all its warnings fatal in
	   nature, so you can not get away with as many things as with the
	   canonical approach.

	   This was not implemented in version 1.0 because of the daunting
	   number of warning categories and the difficulty in getting exactly
	   the set of warnings you wish (i.e. look at the SYNOPSIS in how
	   complicated it is to get a specific set of warnings - it is not
	   reasonable to put this into every module, the maintenance effort
	   would be enourmous).

       But many modules "use strict" or "use warnings", so the memory savings
       do not apply?
	   I suddenly feel sad...

	   But yes, that's true. Fortunately "common::sense" still uses only a
	   miniscule amount of RAM.

       But it adds another dependency to your modules!
	   It's a fact, yeah. But it's trivial to install, most popular
	   modules have many more dependencies and we consider dependencies a
	   good thing - it leads to better APIs, more thought about
	   interworking of modules and so on.

       Why do you use JSON and not YAML for your META.yml?
	   This is not true - YAML supports a large subset of JSON, and this
	   subset is what META.yml is written in, so it would be correct to
	   say "the META.yml is written in a common subset of YAML and JSON".

	   The META.yml follows the YAML, JSON and META.yml specifications,
	   and is correctly parsed by CPAN, so if you have trouble with it,
	   the problem is likely on your side.

       But! But!
	   Yeah, we know.

AUTHOR
	Marc Lehmann <schmorp@schmorp.de>
	http://home.schmorp.de/

	Robin Redeker, "<elmex at ta-sa.org>".

perl v5.10.1			  2011-08-07			    sense(3pm)
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