Schoolboy error teaches a lesson.

This is not a slander of Perl::Critic, but more a need to ensure that I remember the following.

Things break when there are no tests!

perl critic threw a paddy over

print STDERR q{Hello World!} or carp;

Because STDERR is not preceded by a *

So in my program I preceded to be a good little programmer, and put a * in front of all my STDERRs. (Before people ask, this is in a help statement to be outputted to the user if they didn't provide a run id, not really Hello World!, and was actually a quickie script to fix an external bug initially).

In PBP, it mentions the good practice of surrounding *STDERR with braces, but in my case, Perl::Critic didn't throw for this.

Now, here is my problem (my fault). I didn't have a test which at least compiled this script.

Can you guess what happens next? It goes into production, is launched and fails to compile, since

print *STDERR q{Hello World!} or carp;

isn't allowed. Here it is in a one liner:

>perl -e 'print *STDERR qq{hello world};'
syntax error at -e line 1, near "*STDERR qq{hello world}"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

AAAGGHHH! It is a basic schoolboy error, I'm sure, but certainly teaches a lesson after around an hour of digging through logs to try to work out exactly why it worked last week, and not this.

All braced and ready to fly.