That's also why you'll see empty lists and the keyword scalar sometimes -- just a way of being sure that the operation has the desired effect by enforcing context and giving hints to the internal magic.

(Now things like && and and are merely syntactic sugar designed to make Perl Poetry more readable. Right. :)

'and' and 'or' are not merely the syntactic sugar (1) equivalents of && and || - they have a lower precedence. I prefer using && and ||, but 'and' and 'or' come in quite handy occasionally.

(1) A lovely phrase. I wouldn't mind if perl had more for-foreach like things, just so I could sling the phrase around more often. :)

A string comparison is much different than a numeric comparison. Look:

$string = "556foo";
$num = 556;

print "string comparison equal" if $string eq $num;
print "num comparison equal" if $string == $num;
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num comparison equal
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Are you proposing that we differentiate between string and numeric comparisons in some other way than the operators?

Which two sets? || and 'or', or perhaps <=> and 'cmp', or even > and 'gt'? None are redundant, as far as I am concerned.