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vsergu (505)
vsergu
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Sunday November 02, 2003
10:13 AM
Insane return values
From the documentation for the signon() method in Net::AOLIM (emphasis added):
Returns undef on failure, setting $main::IM_ERR and $main::IM_ERR_ARGS as appropriate. Returns 0 on success.
Aagh! And most of the other methods in the module seem to work the same way. Is there some strange programming subculture where such things make sense (perhaps there's a taboo against ever returning true values)?
Of course, I can't get the module to work anyway, so I may go back to Net::AIM, which was sort of working.
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Y/N (Score:2)
Hrmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
definedon the return value and you have a clean test for whether a module call has succeeded. It could be much worseAll of this is moot if the module doesn't work though
:-)Re:Hrmmm (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't too bad? - I guess so. But they are stomping in the
main::namespace (rather than the caller's). Using fixed variables means that they are not threadsafe (at least in a 5.005 threads world, or anything non-perl that has POSIX-like threads semantics). Either point alone would be enough for me to toss this code back.Re:Hrmmm (Score:1)
main::namespace (rather than the caller's). Using fixed variables means that they are not threadsafe (at least in a 5.005 threads world, or anything non-perl that has POSIX-like threads semantics).Wholly agreed. The practice of manipulating variables within the
main::namespace would be something which I too would question. Not necessarily from the perspective of thread safety but for more pragmatic reasons relating to professional (developer) courtesy - Playing in other peoRe:Hrmmm (Score:1)
And consider what happens if your function can legitimately return values from 0 upwards, or can fail. For instance "I updated 0 files in the specified directory" vs "I couldn't open the specified directory". In that case, I like to return undef for failure.