Have you ever thought about returning neither but something else instead?

I could imagine that you do pretty much the same things with all the arrays you return from your various subs (checking their sizes, iterating over them etc).

So why not wrap your arrays in an object that provides nice convenience methods, iterators etc do make life easy for the client code?

In that way you ALWAYS return the same entity (an object - contextual returns are nice but can be confusing to some people) regardless of the list-size (with the memory consumtion of a returned reference), so no special cases and you could build an interface like this:

my $ret = &my_sub(@args);   # returns an object that wraps a list

if(! $ret->isEmtpy ) {
 $ret->each( sub { print $_ } );
}

[download]

Just an idea...

In reply to Re: Return a Reference or Array? by morgon
in thread Return a Reference or Array? by Anonymous Monk

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