foreach (@bar){
    if(/foo/){
        msg("bar bar");
        last;
    }
}
exit();

sub msg {
    print "@_\n";
}
[download]

MJD says you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo! I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6x+5.8x. I take requests. ** The Third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

I'm wondering if 'last' is redundant if the call to the subroutine msg includes an 'exit'.

foreach (@array) {
   die "Yes, key found\n"
     if /key/;
}
[download]

_________
broquaint

update: extraneous semi-colon encountered a Backspace

Back when I used to write a lot more C than I do now, I adopted the practice that if a function is not going to return, its name should have an and_die at the end, unless it's very obvious that it's not going to return (e.g. functions called "fatal", "die", or similar) This makes it impossible to miss. Of course, gcc also has some function attributes you can set that help the compiler optimize more in the case of never-returning functions..

That cannot be optimized away. The compiler can't know what's going to happen at runtime - among others, things like overriding exit or msg..

Note that you have an extraneous semicolon, btw.

Makeshifts last the longest.

While I would be hesitant to put a call to exit in a subroutine (but I have done it in the past), I certainly wouldn't be eagar to remove the 'redundant' last. It gives a clue that after finding key, the array isn't searched any further.

Abigail

Please read this

.02

cLive ;-)

cLive, thanks! see, it didn't occur to me to test with a print statement. it's definitely not in my interest to waste anybody's time or waste words =)

In the small snippet you've shown, and assuming that it's not an extract from a larger program, it wouldn't take too long for a reader with basic Perl skills to untangle what you mean, though they might puzzle over why you wrote "last;" instead of "exit;", and therein lies a problem: Whenever you leave something in your code that a later reader is going to puzzle over, you increase the risk of them breaking the code if they have to change it.

A cleaner way to handle this, as previously mentioned, is to lift the "exit;" out of msg(), and either replace the "last;" with "exit;" or put the exit at the bottom of the loop. Either of these removes a source of confusion.

Consider how unambiguous it is to write:

my @array = qw(hey hello yes no key dog cat);

foreach (@array) {
   if (/key/) {
     msg('Yes, key found');
     exit;
   }
 }

sub msg {
  my ($msg) = @_;
  print "$msg\n";
}
[download]

The other sane alternative, of course, is to get rid of the last after renaming the function to exit_with_msg.

Makeshifts last the longest.

Update: Er. Whoops!

No. Without the last statement, the loop would iterate twice more ('cat' & 'dog') than it needs to. For such a small dataset as shown, the difference is minimal, but if the dataset were large, and the key found early, then a significant saving results by short circuiting the loop.