Perl::...tarray(3pm)

💅 Perl::Critic::Policy::Community::Wantarray

okay bestie, welcome to Perl::Critic::Policy::Community::Wantarray (yes the manual page title is literally that, no notes 💖). It lives in the User Contributed Perl Documentation corner of the world and it has exactly one job: telling you to stop writing context-sensitive functions with wantarray. 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

Perl::Critic::Policy::Community::Wantarray — Don't write context-sensitive functions using wantarray ✨

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So like. Context-sensitive functions? The ones that use wantarray to do the whole DWIM thing (Do What I Mean)? They sound iconic in theory but they're lowkey a mess in practice, because the second somebody accidentally calls your function in a different context, it does something unhinged. Especially if the behaviour changes a lot depending on context. 💀

And it gets worse, bestie — this is also a whole vulnerability situation. If your function was meant to be called as a scalar, but somebody drops it into a list (like a hash constructor or a function parameter list), you're cooked. 😭

The fix is simple, fr fr: functions should be explicitly documented to return either a scalar value or a list. Then there's zero room for confusion and zero room for a security vibe check failure. 👑

Here's the receipts:

  return wantarray ? ('a','b','c') : 3; # not ok
  return CORE::wantarray ? ('a', 'b', 'c') : 3; # not ok
  return ('a','b','c');                 # ok
  return 3;                             # ok

  sub get_stuff {
    return wantarray ? @things : \@things;
  }
  my $stuff = Stuff->new(stuff => get_stuff()); # oops! function will return a list!

See that last one? oops! function will return a list! — that's the whole point. Not the vibe we're going for. 🙈

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🎀 AFFILIATION 🎀

This policy is part of Perl::Critic::Community. Found family, honestly. 🫶

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💅 CONFIGURATION 💅

Not configurable, bestie. This policy is not configurable except for the standard options. That's it, that's the tea. 🍓

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🌈 AUTHOR 🌈

Dan Book, "dbook@cpan.org" 👑

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👑 COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE 👑

Copyright 2015, Dan Book.

This library is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Artistic License version 2.0. slay, legally speaking. 💜

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🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

• Perl::Critic — the mothership ✨

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ok that's the whole page, ty for coming to my ted talk 💖 This was perl v5.40.1, dated 2025-03-22, and it's the Perl::...tarray(3pm) manual page — ily, go fix your functions, periodt. 🎀💅✨