Thanks monks for all of the insight and advice, it's all most appreciated. I guess bottom-line is as advised, the inline statements are only for simple cases. In general I want my code to look more like an sentance than code, like Englishizing:

if ( $cat ) {
 $dog='onALert';
}
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to

  $dog='onALert' if $cat;
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its so much cleaner, easier to read. It would be even nicer if "is" could substitute for =", (sort of like SQL "is NULL") then:

  $dog is 'onALert' if $cat;
  $dog is 'sleeping' unless $cat;
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Nice! Thanks guys for the insight- I'm just syntax-surfing techniques to pretify my code...