Re: [PATCH] gitweb: Fix @git_base_url_list usage

Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> writes:

Side note.  I really hate it when people abuse wantarray.

I can think of only two valid reasons (well, perhaps three but the last one is a logical consequence of the first two) to use wantarray. They are:

 (1) The information you are giving back the caller is list of
     things in nature, but there is a natural representation for
     that list as a single scalar, and that representation is
     not the last element of the list.  You would want to help
     the caller by DWIMmery.

     Perl's built-in localtime() is an excellent example for
     wanting to do something like this.  It returns broken-down
     "struct tm" in list context, but returns string ctime(3) in
     scalar context.

 (2) You want to avoid complex computations when the caller does
     not need full return values from you.  A good example is
     found in perlfunc.pod:

        return unless defined wantarray;	# don't bother doing more
        my @a = complex_calculation();
        return wantarray ? @a : "@a";

 (3) You are emulating Perl's built-in function that DWIMs for
     one of the above reasons, usually (1).