in reply to How to best pass on the context / wantarray?

Rather than relying on (possibly subtle) context or having two versions of each method, you might want to have the copy method and the mutator method and call them both when you want a modified copy. That seems the most clear (and flexible) to me. The overhead is not particularly onerous. 
$cursor->move_right(3); # move cursor three chars to the right
$cursor->move_down(); # move cursor one line downwards

# and

my $left_pos = $cursor->copy->move_left(1);
# position one char to the left of the cursor

my $start = $cursor->copy->start_of_document();

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Re^2: How to best pass on the context / wantarray?
by saberworks (Curate) on Mar 27, 2006 at 18:41 UTC
    Thank you. I was wondering after reading the original post why he was using the context (list or scalar) to determine whether to operate on a copy or the original. What does "a copy or the original" have to do with "list or scalar context" in general? Nothing! If you want to operate on a copy, grab a copy and operate on it.

    Although, I might be misunderstanding what is going on.
[reply]
      The difference was between void or non-void context, not between list or scalar.
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