Hmm. I don't recall ever making the statement that your code was dangerous. You misunderstood "above". Your "real problems" listing is simply programming design which, as I said before, should be taken care of before actually programming. Therefore, when one does get to a line with a return, one is not worrying about "real problems" but whether or not such and such an optimization will prove effective.

Whoa there! Did I just read that a reference may be slower in the long run than copying hordes o' data? Perhaps on the order of ten elements this may be true (while this does not hold for C for obvious reasons) but for the example that we are supposed to be discussing, this will not be case (potentially large hashes). That's enough to warrant concern. You should also be careful with wantarray. A newbie may have problems with this since it the long run, it IS better to reference returns. If you don't, you are automatically guaranteed two copies of the same hash until the garbage collector finds the original- an obvious waste of resources. Imagine a poor PC user with already wasted resources dealing with bloated CGIs. That doesn't make anyone happy, especially since Windows doesn't return memory blocks to the OS (surprise! surprise! some OSs DO!) While agree that the return in your case is valid (since it needs to create the new memory and it doesn't matter where its malloc()'ed but this is still a very limited case. Perhaps we need to bring in Bob Barker with his Benchmark Showdown!:-)

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In reply to RE: RE (tilly) 4: Load Balancing fun.. by AgentM
in thread Load Balancing fun.. by reyjrar

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