Is $return variable anyhow special in Perl?

We have observed strange effects when using $return variable in code 开发者_StackOverflow社区like $return = foo($something);. Is $return variable somehow special because of the return name?

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According to the Perl documentation, no.

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No it is not perl special. But some module my export it and this may provide unexpected behavior.

see This tutorial

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There's nothing special about a variable named $return. That said, writing

my $return = foo($something);
return $return;

is not the same as writing

return foo($something);

The first form puts the call to foo() in scalar context. The latter will propagate the context from the caller. This could cause foo() to behave differently. Compare:

sub foo { return localtime }
sub bar { my $x = foo(); return $x }
sub baz { return foo() }

say join ', ', bar(); # Thu May 26 08:24:59 2011
say join ', ', baz(); # 59, 24, 8, 26, 4, 111, 4, 145, 1

This happens because in scalar context, localtime returns the time formatted as a string but in list context it returns a list of values for seconds, minutes, hours, etc.

The concept of context is unique to Perl. To learn more about it, see perlsub.