[Templates] Patch: Fix problem treating single objects as lists of objects

[Jess Robinson]

On Tue, 21 Nov 2006, Paul Seamons wrote:

> On Monday 20 November 2006 4:44 pm, Jess Robinson wrote:
>> I got bored.. this fixes it for me, albiet only probably one part of the
>> underlying problem. I also didn't fix the XS side since I've no clue how
>> that works. Test included.
>
> I've been watching your threads and have been meaning to mention:
>
> If you're crossing the language barrier between TT and Perl (and they are two
> very distinct languages) then any methods you are exposing should really only
> ever return a single result.  Perl is one of only a few languages that allow
> for you to return multiple things at the same time.  TT tries to handle this
> and does a fairly good job.  But if you are controlling results returned by
> an object - or if you are trying to wrap some other person's object's methods
> for use by TT - you should only ever return a single value.  That means you
> never return a list of values - you always encapsulate that list in an
> arrayref.  Always.
>
> Consequently - this also is a useful and somewhat more intuitive pattern to
> use even if you aren't using TT or crossing other language boundaries.
>
> The patch you submitted looks fine from my perspective.  But I would suggest
> not depending upon it but instead wrap or change the code that is returning
> multiple results sometimes and single results at other times.  That would be
> a two character addition to every return statement in question.
>


Hi Paul,

Yup, that's probably a good idea.. However the API that returns a list in 
list context and an arrayref in scalar context exists and has existed in 
the code I am looking at for quite a while.. I really wouldn't want to 
change that just for TTs convenience.

If I could get TT to call the sub in scalar context that would work just 
as well, but it doesn't.

This is more a case of grafting TT support/output onto existing code than 
code written exclusively for TT.. Possibly we could wrap it somehow.. hmm.

Jess