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Re: [PATCH pod/perlfunc.pod] ref can return false on references

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From:
Abigail
Date:
October 6, 2003 13:00
Subject:
Re: [PATCH pod/perlfunc.pod] ref can return false on references
Message ID:
20031006195952.GA503@abigail.nl
On Mon, Oct 06, 2003 at 12:44:08PM -0700, schwern@pobox.com wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 06, 2003 at 05:06:55PM +0100, Nick Ing-Simmons wrote:
> > Abigail <abigail@abigail.nl> writes:
> > >The first sentence of 'perldoc -f ref' is wrong:
> > >
> > >    Returns a true value if EXPR is a reference, false otherwise.
> > >
> > >To wit:
> > >
> > >    $ perl -wle 'print ref bless [] => 0'
> > >    0
> > 
> > I would be tempted to make that bless illegal.
> 
> I second that tempation.  If the above is legal then this very common idiom
> is no longer correct:
> 
>     print "$r is not a reference" unless ref $r;

The blessing into the class '0' has been legal for as long as I can 
remember, and the code fragment you posted has always been incorrect.

> And I'm not about to go around patching everything to say:
> 
>     print "$r is not a reference" unless length ref $r;
> 
> just so someone can have their Acme module.


It's not a matter of having an Acme module. It's a matter of how Perl
has been working for a long time, and works right now.

I don't like outlawing one specific value as the second argument to
bless, that seems like a horrible kludge to me. If we could go back
in time, I'd would 'ref' return 'undef' when its argument isn't a
reference, but hindsight is always 20/20. 

If someone writes a patch to disallow blessing into the class '0',
I wouldn't oppose it (and I guess the case is edgy enough it doesn't
need a deprecation cycle), but until then, I think the documentation
should be correct. And I'd think that 5.8.2 should just have the doc
patch, not the bless patch to be.


Abigail

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