in reply to Coding superstitions

What do you do at the end of a sub? 
sub Hello
{
  "I am a sub";
}

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I hate that. Nothing particularly wrong with it, it's valid perl, except that I hate it. The following is more to my liking 
sub Hello
{
  return "No! *I* am a sub.";
}

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Hashkeys are a little more forgiving, because how often are you really going to have s p a c e s =>in between, or some such nonsense like others have pointed out, but as with my example above, I'll take being explicit any time over being implicit. I also like to do the following (mainly for visual effect): 
$fooBar->Fooz( 'abc'    => 1,
               'aa0ec'  => 221,
               'abae'   => 12,
               'aecadf' => 145,
             ,)->pack( 'ab' => 11,
                       'cd' => 22,
                     ,);

 
______crazyinsomniac_____________________________
Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most.
perl -e "$q=$_;map({chr unpack qq;H*;,$_}split(q;;,q*H*));print;$q/$q;"

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Re: (crazyinsomniac) Re: Coding superstitions
by n3dst4 (Scribe) on Jan 08, 2002 at 21:21 UTC
    I know what you mean about returning things. I think it's a deep brainwash from all other languages that says unused expressions are useless. Then there's the case where you can't tell at a glance which line acually does the returning. I like returns.

    On a related (im|ex)plicit note, I argued once when I was at uni about this code: 

    sub fred {
    if ($_[0] == 'ooyah') {
        return 1;
    } else {
        return 0;
    }
}

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    The lecturer insisted that I should take out the else and leave the last return dangling there. I still don't know which I prefer.
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      Assuming you don't mind returning 1/undef instead of 1/0 I'd prefer this: 
      sub fred { $_[0] eq 'ooyah' }

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      Or, if you want to keep your '0', how about: 
      sub fred { $_[0] eq 'ooyah' or 0 }

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      -Blake

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        Well caught; the class was actually in Java, but I transliterated the example.
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      I would replace that entire routine with the ? thingie, as in 
      sub fred
{
  return ( ( $_[0] eq 'ooyah' ) ? 1 : 0 );
}

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      Gee, I didn't realize until I was replying that you used == and I corrected that to eq. Not bad for some guy who wrote C code forever.

      And I disagree with the lecturer about leaving the last return to dangle -- what he/she suggested is obsfucation, and you're not doing yourself any favours with that approach.

      --t. alex

      "Excellent. Release the hounds." -- Monty Burns.

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      FWIW, I prefer your version, simply because my brain effortlessly translates the else into $_[0] != 'ooyah', so it is immediately clear to me that the block gets executed if and only if $_[0] != 'ooyah'. I think I can understand the prof's desire for the "dangling return", but I also think it would require a few more clock cycles for my brain to look at that and be convinced exactly under which conditions 0 would be returned. (At the very least, I'd have to see the return 1 above to know that the return 0 would never get executed if the if was true -- because the if might just have done some work without actually returning...)
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