Empty Hash Values

[Dave Cross]

Dave Hodgkinson wrote:
> 
> On 14 Apr 2009, at 18:16, Matt Lawrence wrote:
> 
>> Jasper wrote:
>>> Adrian and I had a tiny chat about this in work, and he decided that
>>> subs that return a scalar should return undef explicitly (if they are
>>> just returning), and those that return a list should return.
>>>
>>> At the time I thought it seemed very sensible, but I'm on the fence 
>>> again.
>>>
>>> Difficult to retroactively enforce, at any rate.
>>>
>> Most of the time just returning does what you expect, it's false in 
>> every context and undef in scalar context.
> 
> And fails PBP for exactly the confusion in previous mails. Plain
> return is Just Wrong. Be explicit.

PBP disagrees with you.

   9.12. Returning Failure

     Use a bare return to return failure.

   Notice that each final return statement in the examples of the
   previous guideline used a return keyword with no argument, rather
   than a more-explicit return undef.

   Normally, relying on default behaviour is not best practice. But in
   the case of a return statement, relying on the default return value
   actually prevents a particularly nasty bug.

   The problem with returning an explicit return undef is that—contrary
   to most people's expectations—a returned undef isn't always false.

Cheers,

Dave...