But that make you do different things in scalar and list context from the callers point of view. Here are two examples where the caller does the same in scalar and list context. First one returns an iterator that is context aware, in the second example the function itself is a context aware iterator.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

sub make_list {
    my @list  = @_;
    my $count = 0;
    sub {wantarray ? do {$count = 0; @list} : $list [$count ++]}
}

my $list = make_list qw /red green blue white brown purple/;

print scalar $list -> (), "\n";
print scalar $list -> (), "\n";
print join " " => $list -> (), "\n";

my @list  = qw /one two three four five six/;
my $count = 0;

sub foo {
    wantarray ? do {$count = 0; @list} : $list [$count ++]
}

print scalar foo, "\n";
print scalar foo, "\n";
print join " " => foo, "\n";
    
__END__
red
green
red green blue white brown purple 
one
two
one two three four five six
[download]

Abigail

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.