Oops, obviously s/\$x/\$a/g

Hello Anonymous Monk,

Thank you for your input, this is an interesting observation.

That observation might be extended to say ... “be careful of simple-tests for ‘falseness,’ if there are several different kinds of ‘falseness’ that you actually need to distinguish.”   Explicitly test for things using exists(), defined(), and so on.   Actually, I customarily test explicitly for every explicit that I expect to see, and cause the program to die() if it falls through all of the cases.   Tests for the “falseness” of the return-value are used in my code only when the value is 1 or 0.   The program catches a lot of its own bugs this way ... especially a concern in a typeless language like Perl.

Tests for the “falseness” of the return-value are used in my code only when the value is 1 or 0.

I more or less agree with the rest of what you are saying, but I do not agree with that. It is perfectly legitimate, Perlish and idiomatic to evaluate an array in scalar/boolean context to figure out if it is empty. The scalar return value may be 0 (the array is empty) or 1, 2, 3, ..., any positive integer other than 0 (the array is not empty). For example:

while (@array) {
     my $val = shift @array;
     # do something with $val
}
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or possibly:

while (my $val = shift @array) {
     # ...
}
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or:

if (length $string) {
     # ...
}
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(but not if ($string), because that might not give the expected result with the string "0"). Or you could have a sub return undef (false) if it did not succeed, or a hash or array reference (something that is always true), or even a simple array or hash, if it did succeed.

Similarly, if you open a file with this idiomatic syntax:

open my $fh, "<", $file or die "failed to open $file $!";
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you're not testing for 0 or 1, and yet it works perfectly and is considered to be a best practice.

Of course, you've gotta know what you're doing and should probably try not to be too clever. I once got bitten by something like this:

$error_count++ and next if some_condition();
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which did not work correctly the first time through the loop, because $error_count was 0 (or undef, whatever it was, I don't remember, it happened some years ago). While:

++$error_count and next if some_condition();
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would have worked fine, I was probably trying at the time to be a little bit too clever (and too concise).

Limiting boolean tests to only 0 and 1 values is taking off a lot of Perl's expressive power.

Update: crossed out one example after the comment below from Anonymous Monk.