... if you mean to return "false", the Perlish way is to return an empty list. This is because by returning 0 you return a single-element list, which evaluates to true in list context.

I feel the risk of that happening is mildly exaggerated. :-)

If you directly evaluate the return value of the sub for truth you supply the sub a Boolean context, and there will be no problem.

To run into problems, you'd have to call the sub in a list context, save the list of 1 return value and then evaluate that in scalar context. But then the problem would be evaluating a list in scalar context when you didn't mean to.

— Arien