Re: Confused Contexts and wantarray

A little experimentation got me the following (somewhat scary) result:

use strict;

sub flab
{
    my @r = ( 1 .. 10 );
    
    wantarray ? @r : \@r;
}

print "flab has ", scalar @{flab()}, " entries\n";
[download]

It does work ...

Comment on Re: Confused Contexts and wantarray Download Code

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Re^2: Confused Contexts and wantarray by MichaelORourke (Initiate) on Jun 15, 2007 at 20:20 UTC
Hi folks, New to 'monks but not Perl. I've used it (wantarray) very effectively (>5.6.1, probably well before) in this way. sub func { my(...) = @_; my @new_a; # assume some assignment to @new_a based on params for(....) {} wantarray? @new_a: \@new_a; } # this one gets you a reference to @new_a in &func() # which is available as long as $ar_array is in scope my $ar_array = &func(...); # this is the copy of @new_a from &func() # @new_a is gone my @array = &func(...); Also: wantarray? @foo: "@foo" wantarray? @foo: $foo[0] aren't nearly the same except the first above is an implicit join to scalar and the second is the first element which may or may not be what you want. [download] Please contact me: morourke@theworld.com	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Confused Contexts and wantarray by redlemon (Hermit) on Jan 19, 2005 at 00:58 UTC
how is this scary? `@{...}` puts `flab()` in array context so it returns the array `@r`. `scalar(...)` then evaluates that array in scalar context, returning its size. I don't see anything magical in there. (apart from me probably mixing array and lists again)	[reply] [d/l] [select]