Perl 5 unless
unless is the negation of if. Too harsh? But that’s the true:
% perl -E 'say "Hello World!" if ( 1 );'
Hello World!
% perl -E 'say "Hello World!" unless ( 1 );'
unless usage is generally discouraged because it can make a code block hard to read, especially for non english coders.
In my applications I often place a flag of dry-run, that is a boolean argument to make the application doing all the things it must, except that it does not commit/complete the workflow. I believe
unless is useful for these kind of situations:
unless( $opts->dry_run ){
$statement->execute( @params )
|| warn '[ERROR] cannot do stuff against the database!';
}
unless conditional that does not pass in the case of the dry_run flag set. I cannot use the postfix version, that would result probably in a more readable code, because the line itself contains a postfix exception handling.