Nil As No Data

In response to a Wenzel P. P. Peppmeyer post I have a thing to add.

The problem of indicating the “no more data” condition is something I dealt with for a couple of times too. While I do like the last solution from Wenzel post, the one with the Failure, but my approach was different. Nil appeals to me as more appropriate for the task in some cases. For example, while developing Concurrent::PChannel I considered it this way:

The channel must be capable of transferring any user data. There must be no exception for what passes through, no false end-of-data markers. Therefore if poll method returns a such a marker it has to be something indistinctively unique to the module.

My solution, in a simplified form, looked like this:

unit module Concurrent::PChannel;
role NoData is export { }
method poll {
    ...;
    $fount ?? $packet !! (Nil but NoData)
}

Simple and straightforward! Because NoData role belongs to the module it guarantees the uniqueness of the return value because the module itself would never mangle with the data injected into the channel. Nor will it push anything into it. Anyone trying to use Concurrent::PChannel::NoData for anything else but testing method poll return value is aware of the consequences. And even though I myself do not test for falseness of poll return value and only check if the role is applied:

if $poll-returned-packed ~~ Concurrent::PChannel::NoData {
    ...
}

But from the boolean point of view Nil but NoData is a False and therefore conforms to another condition in Wenzel’s post.