I got tired of seeing my SQL in big, ugly grey walls of text in my Perl code, so I wanted to syntax highlight them. Of course, since I'm working with a large code base which has evolved over many years, it's simply not possible (or desirable) for me to rip these out and replace them with SQL::Abstract or something else (as has already been suggested) lest I spend a few weeks not developing features and hoping I didn't introduce bugs.

Fortunately, vim allows you to be rather flexible about this.

After some excellent feedback from the Moose list, I thought I could share with you an issue that I know others have been concerned about. What follows are my thoughts on the matter, but I'd very much like to hear advice from others.

Consider the following:

package Foo;
use Moose;

has 'some_value' => (
  is  => 'ro',
  isa => 'Int',
);

When somebody does this:

# value contains the string "No charge"
my $foo = Foo->new({ some_value => $value });

Do you want a 500 error on your Web site or a page which only displays partial information?

There is not a single person reading this entry now how can honestly say what the correct answer is. If you think you know which of the two choices above is correct, you need more experience.

The problem here is that you can't know the answer to that without understanding the underlying problem you're trying to solve and that might involve understanding a heck of a lot about your business. So I have a dilemma.