in reply to Use of wantarray Considered Harmful
Second, there is really only one good use of wantarray - to return an array or an iterator. Array vs. arrayref is tolerable, but only barely. Array vs. first element is completely useless. The key here is that even though different context is used, the same thing is being returned. If you do array vs. first element, you're changing the semantics of the function - it does something different. Arrays vs. iterators are the same thing. Arrays vs. arrayrefs suck because of Perl's syntactic differentiation between arrays/hashes and references to them and the difficulty in determining scalar type. But, given that "scalar" is a type and the various reftype() values are more subtypes than first-class types, this isn't surprising. This, actually, is one of the things I'm looking forward to Perl6 the most - actual proper typing.
My criteria for good software:
- Does it work?
- Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
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Re^2: Use of wantarray Considered Harmful
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Dec 13, 2008 at 20:22 UTC | |
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Dec 14, 2008 at 02:45 UTC | |
by graff (Chancellor) on Dec 14, 2008 at 04:00 UTC | |
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Dec 14, 2008 at 03:35 UTC | |
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Dec 14, 2008 at 05:48 UTC | |
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Dec 14, 2008 at 09:50 UTC | |
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by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Dec 19, 2008 at 16:05 UTC | |
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 14, 2008 at 03:40 UTC |