Actually, the way my examples would have worked (and it wasn't explicitly spelt out), was that they returned a reference to a list of users. Since assigning a reference to a empty list is true I wouldn't have gotten a false negative by returning an empty list. eg: 
@foo = (); 
$bar = \@foo; 
($baz = $bar) 
or warn("assigning a (reference to an empty list) to another scalar is
+ false");

[download]
Of course, what you pointed out is a common gotcha for newbies, and one that I've fallen for a couple of times. Not this time though :)

As I said in reply to bluto's suggestion, I do like the "Exceptional Philosophy", but so far the neatest implementation seems to be signal handling (IMHO).

- Boldra

In reply to Re: Re: style for returning errors from subroutines by Boldra
in thread style for returning errors from subroutines by Boldra

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