develooper Front page | perl.perl5.porters | Postings from December 2021

Re: "no snails"; or having signatured subs complain about @_

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Nicholas Clark
Date:
December 8, 2021 21:18
Subject:
Re: "no snails"; or having signatured subs complain about @_
Message ID:
YbEhJrUYn9CDxARm@etla.org
On Tue, Dec 07, 2021 at 06:02:23PM +0000, Paul "LeoNerd" Evans wrote:

> I think a lot of that isn't even necessary though. A variant of my
> no-snails branch which I haven't yet committed or pushed, very slightly
> relaxes the rules and allows a use of @_ as an rvalue in scalar
> context, purely to allow the code to determine the argument count.

> Potentially we could even still permit the use of @_ but only in
> known-{scalar rvalue} contexts (such as the code above) allowing it to
> continue to run unmodified from its current form. Already there is lots
> of real code out in the wild (on CPAN and elsewhere) using @_ in
> signatured subs in this way, and I think it would be nice not to break
> them.

This was my view too, for this reason.

It's the wrong design if we started from a clean sheet, but we aren't.

Effectively we're saying that (for a while yet) we'll permit `scalar @_` as
a strange special way to write builtin::argc (or something like that, if it
ever comes to exist)

But discourage it for new code. And at some point deprecate it.

Nicholas Clark

Thread Previous | Thread Next


nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About