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Article:
  Perl Program Repair Shop and Red Flags
Subject:   return undef
Date:   2001-05-18 14:36:42
From:   mjd
This is a nice one that I forgot to put in the class.


People like to write return undef
to make a function that returns a false value,
but this is often wrong, because in list context,
return undef returns true.
(It returns a list with a single undefined element.
But only an empty list is false.)


Some programmers are aware of this problem, and write
return wantarray ? () : undef; which works,
but is unnecessarily complicated.


The best answer here is to simply write return;
which returns an undefined scalar value in scalar context,
and an empty list in list context.

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