Don't worry t'mo! Your answer was very complete and well worth the extra effort. As you point out, the ternary operator is very useful anywhere you might put an expression. Which means you can do a 'my' with a ternary assignment, which means you can put it in a print statement's argument list, which means you can do return wantarray ? @list, $list[0]; at the end of your subs to check context and return appropriately... and all sorts of other useful stuff where an if-then is not only cumbersome, but completely unexpressive.