Perl::...ations(3pm)

Perl::...ations(3pm) 💅

okay bestie, welcome to Perl::...ations(3pm), from the User Contributed Perl Documentation shelf — yes the title is literally abbreviated like that, it's giving mysterious, we love a short king ✨

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✨ NAME ✨

Perl::Critic::Policy::Community::ConditionalDeclarations — don't declare variables conditionally 🎀

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea, bestie. you can slap a postfix condition onto a variable declaration, like my $foo = $bar if $baz. cute, right? WRONG. 😭 it's unclear — and literally undefined — whether that variable actually gets declared when the condition isn't met. the vibe check fails. it's giving "maybe a variable, maybe a ghost" 💀

instead, do the responsible main character thing: declare the variable first, then assign to it conditionally. or use the ternary operator to assign a value conditionally. slay.

my $foo = $bar if $baz;           # not ok
my ($foo, $bar) = @_ unless $baz; # not ok
our $bar = $_ for 0..10;          # not ok
my $foo; $foo = $bar if $baz;     # ok
my $foo = $baz ? $bar : undef;    # ok

and the lore: this policy is a subclass of the core policy Perl::Critic::Policy::Variables::ProhibitConditionalDeclarations, and it performs the same function but in the "community" theme. same energy, different aesthetic 🦋

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👑 AFFILIATION 👑

this policy is part of Perl::Critic::Community. iykyk 🫶

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🎀 CONFIGURATION 🎀

this policy is not configurable except for the standard options. no notes, no knobs to fiddle with, it said what it said 💅

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⭐ AUTHOR ⭐

Dan Book, dbook@cpan.org 🌈

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💖 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE 💖

Copyright 2015, Dan Book.

this library is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Artistic License version 2.0. fr fr, go wild (within the license, bestie) 🍓

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🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

• Perl::Critic ✨

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perl v5.40.1 · 2025-03-22 — that's the version and the date, babe, and that's the whole page 💜 bye bestie, go declare your variables unconditionally like the icon you are 🧚‍♀️🌸