My opinion of the ternary has changed throughout the years. I don't really know why, but it has. It might change again, so don't hold me accountable for this in the future. :-) For a long time, I was on your side of the camp. I really didn't like it at all. I thought it was ugly and pointless.

Nowadays I have swung back to the other side. As long as it is used for assignment, and not for side-effects, I don't see a problem with it. In fact, in some circumstances I think it's quite nice. It handles the assignment in one semantic unit (i.e. a single statement), rather than having the default value and the possible new value split up among two statements. Note, nowhere did I mention anything about saving a line of code. I'm all abount semantics, baby. Usually I even spread the ternary out into 3 lines of code, which I find more easily readable:

    my $variable = $test
                 ? $value
                 : 0;
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