What are best practices for working with package and namespace?

Working with packages and namespaces in Perl is essential for organizing your code and avoiding naming collisions. Here are some best practices:

  • Use meaningful names: Choose descriptive names for your packages and modules. This helps in recognizing their functionality at a glance.
  • Maintain a clear hierarchy: Structure your packages in a way that makes their relationships clear, using a hierarchical naming scheme (e.g., MyApp::Model).
  • Use strict and warnings: Always include 'use strict;' and 'use warnings;' in your code to help catch potential issues early.
  • Document your code: Use POD (Plain Old Documentation) to document your packages and functions. This assists other developers (or future you) in understanding the code.
  • Limit global variables: Avoid using global variables across packages; prefer encapsulating data within packages.

Here is a simple example illustrating the use of packages and namespaces:

package MyApp::Utils; use strict; use warnings; sub greet { my $name = shift; return "Hello, $name!"; } 1; # End of the package package main; use MyApp::Utils; my $message = MyApp::Utils::greet("John"); print $message; # Prints: Hello, John!

Perl packages namespaces best practices coding standards