| Subject: | inappropriate exposure of internal constants |
Extracted from an irc log, names elided to protect the guilty:
<@Foo> This makes me sad. http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/SHARYANTO/SHARYANTO-Utils-0.47/lib/SHARYANTO/Scalar/Util.pm
<+dipsy> urgh. long url. Try http://tinyurl.com/ok7u5km
<@Foo> Nasty enough that those return vals were exposed to perl space, but.. why you do this, module author.
<@Bar> Foo: wtf is with those magic numbers?
<@Bar> looks like he's exposing some IS_NUMBER_IN_* constants
<@Qux> it looks generally useful if it's encapsulated and maintained in Scalar::Util to me
<@Bar> it's actually the result of grok_number that is being returned
<@Bar> he's just taking advantage of looks_like_number returning that without canonicalizing to a bool, rather than writing an XS component to call grok_number directly
<@Bar> well clearly someone needs to patch looks_like_number to return !! ...and then release my *own* library that uses these constants :p
Hopefully you get the gist. Please don't abuse internals like this - use a sensible wrapper.