Well, it's not an equivalent statement--I don't know how precise Ant's requirements are, but assuming your print succeeds (which is probable, though not guaranteed), your code will return 1, and his will return undef.

As I say, I don't know what the requirements of the function are, but if the code to which this sub is returning makes assumptions about the return value, this is not a good choice.

That said, I like it. :-)