Avoid Yoda Conditions in Perl You Should

I remember a brief time in the mid-2000s insisting on so-called “Yoda conditions” in my Perl. I would place constants to the left of equality comparisons. In case I accidentally typed a single = instead of ==, the compiler would catch it instead of blithely assigning a variable. For example:

if ( $foo == 42 ) { ... } # don’t do this
if ( 42 == $foo ) { ... } # do this
if ( $foo = 42  ) { ... } # to prevent this

And, because a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, I would even extend this to string and relational comparisons.