in reply to return !!

cosmicperl,
I am suprised that no one mentioned why this convention exists. It is likely a candidate for a small "Perl Idioms Explained".

If you are only interested in the truth of an expression, you can save some cycles by not copying the entire data. In this case, I would have preferred return scalar @array because of the way perl handles truth.

Cheers - L~R

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: return !!
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Mar 04, 2009 at 20:33 UTC

    you can save some cycles by not copying the entire data.

    Since the context is surely scalar, it wouldn't copy the entire data anyway.

[reply]
      ikegami,
      I was speaking to the idiom not this specific example. For instance return $foo; where $foo is the contents of a large file. I also am not sure I agree that the author of the sub can be sure that the caller of the sub would be calling it in scalar context - making the explicit scalar useful.

      Cheers - L~R

[reply]
[d/l]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom