Re: Returning two lists from a sub

in reply to Returning two lists from a sub

I'm not surprised no one has mentioned this one. This is pretty horrible as well. Make the 2 lists have the same size, and then return a hash where the keys are one list and the values are another. Then you can extract both lists from the single list using perl built-ins. I would advise not doing it this way. But just for fun, untested code ahead...

sub foo {
  my ($tmp, @list1, @list2, %vals) = ('aaaaa');
  @list1 = generate_list1();
  @list2 = generate_list2();

  if (@list1 > @list2) {
    push @list2, $tmp++ for 1..@list1-@list2;
  } else {
    push @list1, $tmp++ for 1..@list2-@list1;
  }

  @vals{@list1} = @list2;

  return %vals;
}

my %tmp = foo();
my @list1 = sort grep !/^aaa/, keys %tmp;
my @list2 = sort grep !/^aaa/, values %tmp;
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Re^2: Returning two lists from a sub by kyle (Abbot) on Jun 07, 2007 at 17:49 UTC
This method would fail if the list used as 'keys' has any duplicate items in it.	[reply]
Re^3: Returning two lists from a sub by jynx (Priest) on Jun 07, 2007 at 18:07 UTC
That's one of many problems with it, which is why I did advise not to use it. I just put it here in the spirit of TMTOWTDI and for fun. It's not supposed to be a "serious" way to do it... This was a bad time for a joke apparently... sorry about that.	[reply]

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