As I wrote the title, an idea came to me. At the unix shell, anything other than 0 is an error and the number is the error code. Likewise, if I return an error string, then something went wrong in the function. Otherwise, just issue C<return> at the end of the function and Perl will promote the argument-less return to the appropriate form of nothingness based on caller context. Anyway, before I had my inspiration (written about above), I decided to use Date::Manip error return conventions.

Please critique this sub and tell me if you would do it differently. 

sub ok {

    my $self    = shift;
    my $email   = shift or confess "where's the email?!";
    my $err_ref = shift or confess "where's the err_ref?!";

    if ( $self->{email}{$email} )
      {
      $$err_ref = "duplicate";
      return
      }

    if ( profane ($email, 'definite'))
      {
      $$err_ref = 'profanite/definite';
      return
      }
    if ( $self->{blacklist}->optout($email) )
      {
      $$err_ref = 'optout';
      return
      }
    $self->{email}{$email}++;
    return 1;

}

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Carter's compass: I know I'm on the right track when by deleting something, I'm adding functionality

The Emacs Code Browser

In reply to How to return errors from my object oriented subroutine by princepawn

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