Question

I have a Perl routine that manages error checking. There are about 10 different checks and some are nested, based on prior success. These are typically not exceptional cases where I would need to croak/die. Also, once an error occurs, there’s no point in running through the rest of the checks.

However, I can’t seem to think of a neat way to solve this issue except by using something analogous to the following horrid hack:

sub lots_of_checks
{

 if(failcond)
 {
  goto failstate:
 }
 elsif(failcond2)
 {
  goto failstate;
 }

 #This continues on and on until...

 return 1; #O happy day!

 failstate:

 return 0; #Dead...
}

What I would prefer to be able to do would be something like so:

do
{
 if(failcond)
 {
  last;
 }
 #...
};

Answer 1

An empty return statement is a better way of returning false from a Perl sub than returning 0. The latter value will actually be true in list context:

sub lots_of_checks {
    return if fail_condition_1;
    return if fail_condition_2;
    # ...
    return 1;
}