On Wednesday 12 May 2010 00:55:13 Lutz Gehlen wrote: > Hello everybody, > recently, I read the following statement in a CPAN Ratings entry: > "this package also uses wantarray (a transgression amongst interface > sensibilities)." > > I also sometimes use wantarray and don't see anything bad about it > if the behaviour is documented (which should also be the case > otherwise). I wondered if the above statement reflects the general > opinion among experienced Perl authors. If yes I would be interested > in the reasons. >
Making use of wantarray is a valid way to distinguish between list and scalar (and void) contexts. Perl 6 and http://search.cpan.org/dist/Want/ take it a step further and provide other contexts. Personally, I'm not a big fan of clobbering the return values with a list of values (like perldoc -f split) does, and prefer returning an array reference. But if you like to distinguish between array and scalar contexts, then wantarray is naturally an option. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ "Humanity" - Parody of Modern Life - http://shlom.in/humanity God considered inflicting XSLT as the tenth plague of Egypt, but then decided against it because he thought it would be too evil. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
