Re: return !!

[Limbic~Region]

cosmicperl,
I am suprised that no one mentioned why this convention exists. It is likely a candidate for a small "Perl Idioms Explained".

If you are only interested in the truth of an expression, you can save some cycles by not copying the entire data. In this case, I would have preferred return scalar @array because of the way perl handles truth.

[ikegami]

you can save some cycles by not copying the entire data.

Since the context is surely scalar, it wouldn't copy the entire data anyway.

[Limbic~Region]

ikegami,
I was speaking to the idiom not this specific example. For instance return $foo; where $foo is the contents of a large file. I also am not sure I agree that the author of the sub can be sure that the caller of the sub would be calling it in scalar context - making the explicit scalar useful.