Perl 5.8.0 comes with Scalar::Util. One of the subroutines provided by this module is reftype(). reftype() is superior to UNIVERSAL::isa() in this context. For blessed or non-blessed array references, reftype() will always return 'ARRAY'.

Personally, I plan to use Scalar::Util::reftype() quite a bit in cases where I used to use UNIVERSAL::isa().

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Context aware functions - best practices? by MarkM
in thread Context aware functions - best practices? by Aristotle

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