the $in...

As you may or may not know, perl will return the last value in a subroutine it sees... so 

sub foo {
  'foo';
}

[download]
will return foo even without an explicit return 'foo';
so in a case like the following 
print(foo(),"\n");

sub foo {
    if(1) {
        'foo';
    } else {
        'bar';
    }
}

[download]
foo will be printed, since it is the last real value perl saw in the subroutine, everything else was basically blank lines... BUT! one must be careful in this situation because if you ever come back and put code in after the if statement like 
print(foo(),"\n");

sub foo {
    if(1) {
        'foo';
    } else {
        'bar';
    }
    print STDERR 'fooed';
}

[download]
then you will get 1, the return value of a successful print. most people use an explicit return unless the value they are returning is the last line of the sub, since it is then much harder to miss.

                - Ant
                - Some of my best work - Fish Dinner

In reply to Re: Re: Can this If/Else be condensed into a 1 liner with a trailing If? by suaveant
in thread Can this If/Else be condensed into a 1 liner with a trailing If? by jerrygarciuh

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.