Re: Parameter validation for numeric function arguments?

Some factors to consider:

Is the function part of a public interface?
Is the function only used in a single project?
How likely is it that an incorrect argument is provided?
What are the consequences of receiving bad arguments?
Does the function fail safe or fail hard??

Should this function validate its input and warn/fail if a non-numeric value is provided? The built-in functions do not do this

Actually, they do.

>perl -wE"say sin('foo')"
Argument "foo" isn't numeric in sin at -e line 1.
0

>perl -wE"say cos('3.1415bar')"
Argument "3.1415bar" isn't numeric in cos at -e line 1.
-0.999999995707656
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Comment on Re: Parameter validation for numeric function arguments? Download Code

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Re^2: Parameter validation for numeric function arguments? by janert (Sexton) on Aug 24, 2011 at 22:17 UTC
Thanks to everyone who has chimed in. What I am taking away here is this: We all agree that input validation is desirable... ... but the way to do it is via warnings, which can be switched on/off using `use warnings;` or the `-w` flag. (Inspect the `$^W` variable in your code to find out.) Thanks again, this was helpful.	[reply] [d/l] [select]