[Bioperl-l] For CVS developers - potential pitfall with "return undef"

Torsten Seemann torsten.seemann at infotech.monash.edu.au
Tue May 30 08:18:45 UTC 2006


FYI Bioperl developers:

I just audited the bioperl-live CVS and found about 450 occurrences of 
"return undef".

Page 199 of "Perl Best Practices" by Damian Conway, and this URL
http://www.perl.com/lpt/a/2006/02/23/advanced_subroutines.html suggest:

"Use return; instead of return undef; if you want to return nothing. If 
someone assigns the return value to an array, the latter creates an 
array of one value (undef), which evaluates to true. The former will 
correctly handle all contexts."

So I'm guessing at least some of these 450 occurrences *could* result in 
bugs and should probably be changed.

Your opinion may differ :-)

-- 
Dr Torsten Seemann               http://www.vicbioinformatics.com
Victorian Bioinformatics Consortium, Monash University, Australia




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