Re^3: Hope a subroutine will return undef by default

[LanX]

well if you really wanna "golf" better skip the semicolon and safe 33% of the necessary characters. ;-)

[choroba]

It is a good habit to omit semicolons after the commands that should not be followed by anything else (return, next, etc.). If you accidentaly add something, you get an error.

[tobyink]

My main concern is not one of brevity. The return keyword does two things: it establishes the return value of the function, and it also acts as flow-control, exiting the current function.

(); is a way to set the return value of a function to nothing without using a keyword that screams out "flow-control" to readers skimming the code.

Update: As an aside, in Kavorka there is a lot of Perl code re-writing that goes on. For example, writing something like this:

method foo ($x) {
   return $x + 1;
}

Will actually be rewritten internally to something like:

sub foo {
   my $self = shift;
   my $x = @_>=1 ? shift(@_) : croak("Requires \$x");
   return $x + 1;
}

So far, so good. But what about this method:

method bar ($x) { }

We'd expect it to return nothing. But it's rewritten to something like:

sub bar {
   my $self = shift;
   my $x = @_>=1 ? shift(@_) : croak("Requires \$x");
}

Which would actually return $x! The solution? Kavorka inserts (); into the sub body after unpacking parameters from @_. It couldn't use return because that's flow-control, and would prevent the main body of the function from executing.

[LanX]

IMHO its still flow control (its an exit point), so no need to hide it.

(); is fine for short lambdas, otherwise IMHO explicit is better than implicit.

YMMV! :)