rampant selectrow_array misuse

[Benton, Kevin]

> > Both of these functions, as their names imply, return arrays.
>
> That's not actually true, as far as I can tell. DBI docs are strangely

> hard to find on the net, but I tend to use
> http://www.he.net/info/mysql/dbi.html
> or a more up-to-date copy thereof. (I'm linking to that one because
I've 
> just found my bookmark to perldoc.com is broken.)
>
> "This utility method combines prepare, execute and fetchrow_array into
a 
> single call. If called in a list context it returns the first row of 
> data from the statement. If called in a scalar context it returns the 
> first field of the first row."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Dave's main point is still valid -
if the function returns a null value, the while loop ends, correct?

In any case, I believe Dave has another valid point - even if it is
technically correct to use the scalar context, style-wise, it seems to
me it would be more clear (better self-documenting) if we use array
context instead by wrapping the variable with ()'s.  This seems
especially true to me if you "select foo, bar from baz";  In either
case, to prevent inconsistent results, I think we should use one or the
other, not both.

On using arrayrefs, I think that as long as the selectrow_array and the
variable assignment are very close together, the additional overhead
required to deal with hashes isn't worth it.

---
Kevin Benton
Perl/Bugzilla Developer
Advanced Micro Devices
 
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