[Bioperl-l] Bio::Tools::GuessSeqFormat unknown return value?

[Hilmar Lapp]

That pretty much says what I've said as well. If there's no value then 
don't return one.

	-hilmar

On Wednesday, December 10, 2003, at 04:26  AM, Aaron J. Mackey wrote:

> I'd vote for undef as the most useful "Perlish" convention:
>
>  die "Say what?" unless $format = $guesser->guess_format($file);
>
> vs:
>
>  die "Say what?" unless ($format = $guesser->guess_format($file)) && 
> $format ne "unknown";
>
> -Aaron
>
>
>
> On Dec 10, 2003, at 4:35 AM, Heikki Lehvaslaiho wrote:
>
>>
>> Bio::Tools::GuessSeqFormat returns now string 'unknown'. My question 
>> is: how
>> strongly should we enforce the convention that unknown values return 
>> undef?
>>
>> In practice, the choises are (1) undef, (2) empty string, (3) zero, 
>> (4)
>> predefined string value.  What are are the advantages and 
>> disadvantages of
>> this. Discuss.
>>
>> I seem to remember that Hilmar felt strongly about this. ;-)
>>
>> 	-Heikki
>>
>> -- 
>> ______ _/      _/_____________________________________________________
>>       _/      _/                      http://www.ebi.ac.uk/mutations/
>>      _/  _/  _/  Heikki Lehvaslaiho    heikki_at_ebi ac uk
>>     _/_/_/_/_/  EMBL Outstation, European Bioinformatics Institute
>>    _/  _/  _/  Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton
>>   _/  _/  _/  Cambs. CB10 1SD, United Kingdom
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-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Hilmar Lapp                            email: lapp at gnf.org
GNF, San Diego, Ca. 92121              phone: +1-858-812-1757
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