comment on

Given how often I hear about (even experienced) programmers mistakenly typing "=" in an if statement when they meant "==", I don't know if encouraging this particular idiom as a rare case where it is indeed what you mean is a good idea. Might I suggest this instead:

while (my $result = thatroutine()) {
     return $result;
}
[download]

As an aside, I was actually surprised that the version with if didn't warn about the single "=", but a little testing showed that the warning only appears to happen if you mistakenly assign (instead of compare) a literal value, not a subroutine.

-xdg

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In reply to Re: For clarity and cleanliness, I'd recommend... by xdg
in thread looking for a good idiom: return this if this is true by merlyn

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