Stupid people require oxygen to live.

This works fine for me:

function foo() {
  bar[0]="hello"
  bar[1]="world"
  return 1
}
if ! foo; then
  echo "${bar[@]}"
fi

https://onlinegdb.com/xPIFP110w

Are you getting messed up by the way bash handles exit statuses? An exit status of 0 indicates a success and a non-zero exit status indicates a failure (which allows for the different exit statuses to indicate different errors).

So if my_func; then something; fi will only run something when my_func returns 0. In your case, you’re using ! to do the opposite so it only runs when your function returns a non-zero status.

This can be quite surprising if you’re expecting the behavior found in other languages like python or C++ where 0 represents false and 1 represents true.

People seem to have this view that everyone in the '60s was a hippie but that’s just not true. Time Magazine put the number around 300,000. In a country of 200 million, that’s only 0.15% of the population. They were a counterculture not mainstream culture. The vast majority of kids did not become hippies, and many actively hated the hippies.

My current favorite is Slice & Dice

Then what kind should I use instead?

It’s useful when vim is being run from a different program or script.

For example, if I run p4 change to create a new Perforce changelist it will open up my editor (which I have set to vim) so that I can enter the CL description and other fields. If I realize I don’t actually actually want to create the CL yet I can use :cq to quit with an error so that p4 knows to abort.

I also have a script I use for diffing a list of file pairs. It runs vimdiff on the first pair of files then if I exit with :qa it will move on to the next pair of files. But if I exit with :cq it will just abort and skip all of the remaining file pairs.

I agree that it’s the most obvious choice, but it also doesn’t work when there are hidden buffers open. :qa! and :cq should always work so they are arguably more correct