in reply to The best "true zero" is...
The thing I like about "0 but true" is that it is self-explanatory; with any of the others, I'd feel obligated to insert a comment explaining why I was returning zero in that particular way, so that some hapless soul a few years later doesn't pull out hair figuring out why my code is so weird; with "0 but true" I expect any decent Perl programmer to be able to figure it out, because the jist of the reason is contained in the value; assuming the reader understands context, it'll just click. (And if the reader doesn't understand context, he won't be able to maintain my code anyway; I make frequent use of context and consider it a major concept of the language.)
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