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On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 09:43:27AM -0700, Bill Ward wrote:
> Cool. That whole scalar vs list context thing is one of Perl's biggest
> strengths, but also one of its biggest weaknesses (in that it is a common
> source of bugs like this). When you see head-scratching problems, it's one
> of the first things to look for.
Just guessing here, not familiar with the particular code in question.
But I have been bitten a few times by code which returns false in the
'proper' manner
return;
instead of forcing a scalar return
return undef;
or list return
return ();
Is that what's going on here -- the original code imparted a list
context, which triggered another perl gotcha, whereby missing list
values simply disappear:
scalar(1,2,,4,,6) ---> 4, not 6
I understand and appreciate most of Perl's little tricks, but they
sometimes catch me by surprise and elicit a few curses while debugging.
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