use Perl

• Hrmmm (Score:2, Insightful)

  by rob_au (1845) <reversethis-{moc ... {ta} {yesac.bor}> on 2003.11.02 14:32 (#25388) Journal

  This isn't too bad - All you need to do is call defined on the return value and you have a clean test for whether a module call has succeeded. It could be much worse ... They might not have documented this behaviour or indeed any module return values at all.

  All of this is moot if the module doesn't work though

  :-)

  Reply to This

  • Re:Hrmmm (Score:3, Informative)

    by nicholas (3034)

    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)

      by rob_au (1845)

      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).

      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 peo
  • Re:Hrmmm (Score:1)

    by drhyde (1683)

    Right, if it's documented, and is consistent across the module, what's the problem? If you prefer true/false, write a wrapper.
    
    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.