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answer  Re: The best "true zero" is...  by jonadab (Parson) on
Jul 06, 2005 at 14:06 UTC ( #472802=note: print w/ replies,
xml ) Need Help??   The thing I like about "0 but true" is that
it is self-explanatory; with any of the others, I'd feel
obligated to insert a comment explaining why I was returning
zero in that particular way, so that some hapless soul a few
years later doesn't pull out hair figuring out why my code is so
weird; with "0 but true" I expect any decent Perl programmer to
be able to figure it out, because the jist of the reason is
contained in the value; assuming the reader understands context,
it'll just click. (And if the reader doesn't understand context,
he won't be able to maintain my code anyway; I make frequent use
of context and consider it a major concept of the language.)
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