Other than populating lists about to become hashes, what advantages do you find with the explicit return undef convention?

I've already given other examples in this thread. In particular, passing arguments to functions and assigning values to a list of scalar variables.

because [assigning a list to a hash] was an obviously made-up example and I didn't care to pick at it.

Well, I don't often use "key1" as a key name nor name a function "genValue", but otherwise that code isn't an outlandish made-up example stretched beyond reason just to prove some point. It is an example of quite typical code that I chose exactly because I consider it quite typical, reasonable code that I've written often and see often. You never assign a list to a hash? Or do you never call functions when you do this? Perhaps you sometimes use "named arguments" to functions? That has identical problems.

I don't know how to come up with examples that meet your expectations for being worth picking at if you can't tell me what is unreasonable about assigning a list to a hash (or passing (named or just positional) arguments to functions or assigning a list of scalar expressions to a list of scalar variables).

You find val() || undef more readable / maintainable? We aren't talking about whether or not you can work around the over-use of return;, we are talking about whether it improves code in all cases. val() // undef would at least be closer in meaning to scalar val() but val() || undef assumes that all false values mean the same as undef. Just like it can be quite appropriate for "failure" to be returned as '' (as opposed to () or even explicit undef), it can be even more important for '' to be distinct from undef.

Even push @results, doTask(); suffers if "failure" can only ever be the empty list. That'd have to be push @successes, doTask();.

- tye        

In reply to Re^8: Module Announcement: Perl-Critic-1.01 ("scalar") by tye
in thread Module Announcement: Perl-Critic-1.01 by jthalhammer

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