Re: UNIVERSAL::ref might make ref( $mocked_obj ) sane

[Yuval Kogman]

On Sun, Feb 25, 2007 at 23:22:13 -0800, Joshua ben Jore wrote:

> Ick!!!! Neither ref nor blessed have never been a booleans before and
> even this doesn't change that. Ref couldn't even used to decide if you
> had an object because the two false values '' and '0' can both be
> returned by objects:
> 
>  ok( ref( bless( ..., "\0" ) ), 'Detected object' ) # fails
>  ok( ref( bless( ..., 0 ) ), 'Detected object' ) # fails
> 
> The only boolean you'll ever have on Perl 5 is defined( blessed( ... )
> ). It's a bad pattern to rely on ref(). Or... all '' and '0' using
> classes were using UNIVERSAL::ref then... maybe... ref() could be
> considered a boolean. I'd have to be convinced.

But do you have an alternative? ;-)

Realistically, blessing as "0" is intended to make if ( ref $x ) )
return false (at least the one crazy person who did that and
released it on the CPAN intended it to be this way ;-), and blessing
to "\0" probably works similarly.

From perldoc:

   ref     Returns a non‐empty string if EXPR is a
                   reference, the empty string otherwise. 

I suppose

        if ( length( ref $x ) ) { }

is a better test, but when have you ever seen that? I don't think
i'll start using it.

-- 
  Yuval Kogman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://nothingmuch.woobling.org  0xEBD27418

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