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Postings from January 2011
On Sun, 30 Jan 2011, Nicholas Clark wrote:
>
> I'm really not convinced that prototypes (as is) add any value in the general
> case. To my mind, they complicate reading the code, because they provide
> action-at-a-distance on how the parser is going to treat function calls.
>
> There seemed to be a fashion for using them extensively around 5.003-5.004
> time (for example, a lot of the regen code in the core), and looking at that
> code now, it feels dated to me, and lacking some KISS.
I always thought prototypes are primarily for the definition of CORE::GLOBAL::*
functions and similar. This thought is somewhat supported by perlsub.pod:
Because the intent of this feature is primarily to let you define
subroutines that work like built-in functions, here are prototypes for
some other functions that parse almost exactly like the corresponding
built-in.
So I don't think prototypes should be used for "regular" functions that
don't try to implement some core-like primitives (e.g. using it for the
recently discussed kvmap() function seems sensible).
The only exception for non-core-like functions that I find sensible is using
the empty prototype for constant functions:
$ perl -wE 'sub FOO {3}; say FOO+1'
3
$ perl -wE 'sub FOO () {3}; say FOO+1'
4
Without the prototype the "FOO+1" is parsed as "FOO(+1)" instead of
"FOO()+1".
Cheers,
-Jan
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