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• It's not the subroutine, it's the block. (Score:1)

  by Abigail (26)

  It's the fact that return value of blocks is the last expression evaluated. And the body of a subroutine is a block.

  The fact that blocks return the last expression evaluated is what makes writing concise maps and greps.

  Also note that whether a subroutine returns something or not is not determined by a return, or a last expression. Like anything else, it's determined by context. A subroutine will return nothing, if, and only if, it's called in void context. Otherwise, it will return something, even if it
  • Re:It's not the subroutine, it's the block. (Score:2)

    by Dom2 (2981) <{dom} {at} {happygiraffe.net}> on 2006.10.30 15:57 (#51358) Homepage Journal

    I've been bitten by this in mod_perl handlers. I forgot to return OK, and the final statement was returning undef. That triggered a "Use of uninitialised value" message in the error log... but it had no line number info. That took me months to track down. I've always been very explicit about using return since then.

    -Dom

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