Re^2: RFC: Regexp::AllMatches

[lodin]

I'll definately consider ::Exhaustive. Thanks!

does ->next() return a list? if yes, why?

There are different opinions and tastes regarding this. I prefer to design iterators so that the next method returns undef in scalar context and the empty list in list context when it's exhausted. A successful match may be "" or "0", and that would force me to write

    while (defined(my $match = $matcher->next)) {
        ...
    }

to not leave the loop prematurely.

lodin

[wind]

There is another way to handle the return value in a loop. Instead of returning a string, return an object that overloads the boolean, numerical, and string operators.

An example of this in practice is the IO::Prompt module on cpan. Here is an excerpt of the source:

package IO::Prompt::ReturnVal;

use overload
    q{bool} => sub {
        $_ = $_[0]{value} if $_[0]{set_val};
        $_[0]{handled} = 1;
        $_[0]{success};
    },
    q{""} => sub { $_[0]{handled} = 1; "$_[0]{value}"; },
    q{0+} => sub { $_[0]{handled} = 1; 0 + $_[0]{value}; },
    fallback => 1,
    ;

sub DESTROY {
    $_ = $_[0]{value} unless $_[0]{handled};
}

As you can see, it also provides mechanisms for setting $_.

Anyway, just wanted to throw out another option. Please note that the IO::Prompt module only runs on unix based systems currently AFAIK.

- Miller