Re^2: OO design: returning string and/or special value

True, hash/array assignment and other such things can trip sleepy programmers up. It's very unlikely to ever be called in this manner in my case, but certainly not out of the question. What I do wonder though, is whether that necessarily means "don't use wantarray," or if it's reasonable to trust an experienced Perl programmer to understand list and scalar context in a documented method, to avoid other potential bugs and reduce the average cognitive load of the programmer in question. What do you think?

Comment on Re^2: OO design: returning string and/or special value

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Re^3: OO design: returning string and/or special value by swl (Prior) on Oct 07, 2019 at 23:13 UTC
I use wantarray in my code, but with the aim of doing so consistently, i.e. related methods all use it or all don't. Returning list refs is generally faster, especially if the list is large, so in some cases it is added as an optimisation that will not break (or will break less) code elsewhere in the system. This code is not on CPAN, though, so I have more freedom in doing so.	[reply]