What's the best Perl practice for returning hashes from functions?

Question

I am mulling over a best practice for passing hash references for return data to/from functions.

On the one hand, it seems intuitive to pass only input values to a fun

Answer 1

The first one is better:

my ($ref_array,$ref_hash) = $this->getData('input');

The reasons are:

• in the second case, getData() needs to check the data structures to make sure they are empty
• you have freedom to return undef as a special value
• it looks more Perl-idiomatic.

Note: the lines

@array = @{$ref_array};
%hash = %{$ref_hash};

are questionable, since you shallow-copy the whole data structures here. You can use references everywhere where you need array/hash, using -> operator for convenience.