I think they meant more like my AT-POS example: the point is the return value, but you can't say ahead of time what type it will have.
On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 2:48 PM Trey Harris <t...@lopsa.org> wrote: > > > On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 02:13 JJ Merelo <jjmer...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> >> El jue., 4 oct. 2018 a las 3:36, Trey Harris (<t...@lopsa.org>) escribió: >> >>> _All_ routines in Perl 6 return _something._ A lack of a "-->" simply >>> indicates stylistically that the return is not useful because it's whatever >>> "falls off the end". (There's a bit of variance here as I'm not sure it's a >>> convention everyone has followed.) It's equivalent to "--> Mu" because >>> anything that could "fall of the end" is Mu. >>> >> >> No, it means that it's not constrained to a type. It can still return >> something, but it can be anything. >> > > > I get all that, except for the "No" at the front. ;-) > > Or were you talking about the "not useful" bit? Yes, of course in any > given codebase, the lack of a return value has no more or less meaning than > a lack of any constraint. The programmer may not like using constraints at > all and treats Perl 6 like Perl 5 in the respect of wanting arbitrarily > mungible values. > > But the word "stylistically" was important, as I was responding to Todd's > question about the docs—I think a lack of a return value in the docs (at > least, the ones I could come up with in a grep pattern on my checkout of > docs) does tend to indicate that the return is not useful, that the routine > is a "procedure" run for its side effects rather than for evaluation. > > Is that what you meant? > > If you were saying in "it can still return something, but can be > anything", that "anything ⊃ (is a strict superset of) `Mu`", then I don't > understand, because I thought all values conformed to Mu. > > -- brandon s allbery kf8nh allber...@gmail.com
