Sysseek does not return a conditional, it returns a position or undef. I used the word conditional because it has a standard definition, and you are pretending to not understand it. Presumably. You can try to pretend being explicit about what a return value of something must be is bad, but if you say that you can't sit there and argue that having literally no idea is more informed. That is worse than wrong.

In C there are more than one return values on failures, and there are functions which return status values or pointers. Ironically, mentioning sysseek is important, they couldn't do if( ! sysseek() ){...} because the failure state, undef, and a success state, 0, both become a truthful value after not so they ended up using an exception to get around a lousy logic style. Additionally, even if you use defined, you have to know in advance whether or not your function can return a defined-but-false value. With explicit return values, there is no confusion unless you are deliberately being foolish. Defined itself not returning the value on success or undef on not defined is probably the core reason we can't have sensible returns.

And documentation is nice, except if you've ever worked in a production environment with code more than five minutes old. Say 20+ years.

In reply to Re^6: Regex result being defined when it shouldn't be(?) by chenhonkhonk
in thread Regex result being defined when it shouldn't be(?) by chenhonkhonk

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