That statement doesn't contradict my position. I never said that a single scalar can't also be considered as a list. I'm not playing some semantic game. I'm talking about practical implications.

If we want to play your semantic game, then replace "scalar" with "single-item list" throughout what I wrote (which requires patching Perl to rename the scalar() function, but such is life).

If you have a function that always returns exactly one item (as the list of items that it returns), then it doesn't make sense to change this function to return a zero-item list in one special case. (Why? Read what I wrote above.)

lc doesn't return a scalar

Repeat that to a few random people who know Perl and see how silly this particular semantic argument is. lc() always returns just a scalar. The list of scalars that lc() returns always has a size of one. Those are both true. *shrug*

- tye        

In reply to Re^6: Module Announcement: Perl-Critic-1.01 ("scalar") by tye
in thread Module Announcement: Perl-Critic-1.01 by jthalhammer

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