On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 1:38 AM, Paul Johnson <p...@pjcj.net> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2014 at 04:17:53PM +0800, Ken Peng wrote:
>> which one is the better way to return the list content? And if the
>> method is an instance method?
>
> Functionally, the two are identical. The first is returning a reference
> to the array you have created. The second is returning a reference to a
> new array created from a (shallow) copy of the array you have created.
[ snip ]
To expand further (because you asked about "list context"), note that
both are returning a _scalar_, because references are always scalars.
If you want to return a list, you should just do
return @x;
If you wanted the return value to depend on the calling context, you
could use 'wantarray' like so:
return wantarray ? @x : \@x;
That said, APIs that have contextually dependent return values are
usually fairly confusing to use, so consider not doing this.
chrs,
john.
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