Instead of returning the value I want, Contextual::Return returns a Contextual::Return::Value, an opaque inside-out object, that allows polymorphic access to the returned value. Suppose I have this:

use Contextual::Return;

sub foo {
    my $blah = bless { name => shift }, 'whatever';

    return
        VOID    { croak "Useless use of foo() in void context" }
        STR     { $blah->{name} }
        OBJREF  { $blah }
        DEFAULT { $blah }
}

my $foo = foo('Boris');

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Suppose I have some other code expecting a certain object type. Now ref($foo) is completely meaningless. Sure, I can do $foo->isa, but I still can't access my underlying data directly: $foo->{name} blows up:

DEFAULT block did not return a suitable reference to the hash dereference at ...

The only way I've been able to find to get at the HASH ref is with some awful incantation like eval $foo->Contextual::Return::DUMP(), which of course does not contain the original references.

These are just a couple of the issues for example's sake. I could work around them, but suffice to say it's making my life harder, not easier. Did I miss the point of this module? Can the C::R blocks be made to return the actual references within them, instead of the C::R::Value objects? I thought the FIXED modifier might do this, but it didn't seem to make a difference.

In reply to Contextual::Return blocks: can they be made to return the actual result? by wanna_code_perl

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