After reading flyingmoose's reaction to merlyn's post, I wandered through the POD myself to see if any of the behaviors that merlyn discussed are in some way undocumented such that they should come as a surprise. In just about every case, I found what I was looking for. I thought I might as well offer a little more detail on the ones that seemed most interesting.
- grep: The POD states that in scalar context grep returns the number of times the expression was true. The fact that it is true as many times as the length of the list-context return value is ... well, expected.
- sort: The POD for sort states that in scalar context the behavior of sort is undefined (which is different from undef. So if merlyn's experience is that it returns undef in scalar context, that behavior can't be relied upon to not change in future Perl implementations.
- getpwnam: The POD for getpwnam is a little more generic, applying to this entire group of functions. Therefore, its description is a little vague. It states that "in scalar context you get the name, unless the function was a lookup by name, in which case you get the other thing, whatever it is." The example given is $uid = getpwnam($name); ...so I'd say that behavior is documented though a little obscure.
- select: The POD for select
doesn't textually discuss the scalar-context return value of the four arg version of the function. However, there is an example given in the POD, and it is in keeping with merlyn's findings. Update: It is also discussed briefly in the text (thanks ambrus... good catch).
- caller: The POD for caller states "In scalar context, returns the caller's package name if there is a caller, that is, if we're in a subroutine or eval, or require, and the undefined value otherwise." (undef)
Regarding flyingmoose's dismay over the situation, and his call for improved consistancy, this came up awhile back in What should be returned in scalar context?. I think that the general consensus was that functions should return what it makes sense for them to return in scalar context. In other words, don't get too caught up in trying to make all list-oriented functions return the same thing in scalar context. Not every shoe fits every foot.
To call these behaviors bugs is irrational, since they, in most cases, are doing something useful, and something that's defined in the documentation. The suggestion to not make assumptions is spot-on; that's why the POD is there -- so assumptions don't have to be made.
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