[Bioperl-l] Bio::Tools::GuessSeqFormat unknown return value?

[Aaron J. Mackey]

I'd vote for undef as the most useful "Perlish" convention:

  die "Say what?" unless $format = $guesser->guess_format($file);

vs:

  die "Say what?" unless ($format = $guesser->guess_format($file)) && 
$format ne "unknown";

-Aaron



On Dec 10, 2003, at 4:35 AM, Heikki Lehvaslaiho wrote:

>
> Bio::Tools::GuessSeqFormat returns now string 'unknown'. My question 
> is: how
> strongly should we enforce the convention that unknown values return 
> undef?
>
> In practice, the choises are (1) undef, (2) empty string, (3) zero, (4)
> predefined string value.  What are are the advantages and 
> disadvantages of
> this. Discuss.
>
> I seem to remember that Hilmar felt strongly about this. ;-)
>
> 	-Heikki
>
> -- 
> ______ _/      _/_____________________________________________________
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>      _/  _/  _/  Heikki Lehvaslaiho    heikki_at_ebi ac uk
>     _/_/_/_/_/  EMBL Outstation, European Bioinformatics Institute
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>   _/  _/  _/  Cambs. CB10 1SD, United Kingdom
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