Re: cleaning perl code

On 2020-Apr-16, Hamlin, Garick L wrote:

> With the old expression 'something;' would be stripped away.
> Is that an issue where this this is used? Why are we parsing
> these headers?

These are files from which bootstrap catalog data is generated, which is
why we parse from Perl; but also where C structs are declared, which is
why they're C.

I think switching to non-greedy is a win in itself. Non-capturing
parens is probably a wash (this doesn't run often so the performance
argument isn't very interesting).

An example. This eval in Catalog.pm

+ ## no critic (ProhibitStringyEval)
+ ## no critic (RequireCheckingReturnValueOfEval)
+ eval '$hash_ref = ' . $_;

is really weird stuff generally speaking, and the fact that we have to
mark it specially for critic is a good indicator of that -- it serves as
documentation. Catalog.pm is all a huge weird hack, but it's a critically
important hack. Heck, what about RequireCheckingReturnValueOfEval --
should we instead consider actually checking the return value of eval?
It would seem to make sense, would it not? (Not for this patch, though
-- I would be fine with just adding the nocritic line now, and removing
it later while fixing that).

All in all, I think it's a positive value in having this code be checked
with a bit more strength -- checks that are pointless in, say, t/00*.pl
prove files.

--
Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services