• $x ?: $y

• $x ? $x : $y

But I think Perl has bigger fish to frie.

My point was that if the ternary conditional is an lvalue, then I don't see why not to make the '||' and '//' operators lvalues. It would result in better consistency.

... implementing the "Elvis operator" ... as $x ? $x : $y

Actually, I read the opposite from the Wiki article:

... the Elvis operator expression A ?: B is approximately equivalent to the ternary conditional expression A ? A : B

... something like ... x = f() ?: g() ... is equivalent to ... the conditional ternary operator x = f() ? f() : g() except that it does not evaluate f() twice if it yields truthy.

Accentuations by me.

Greetings,
🐻

$gryYup$d0ylprbpriprrYpkJl2xyl~rzg??P~5lp2hyl0p$

That makes PHP's Elvis operator a value-preserving logical-OR operator, like Perl's ||.

According to the article, || also has this function in Common Lisp, Clojure, Lua, Object Pascal, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. It's rather disingenuous to call the article "Elvis operator".

In C, || is normalizes the value to 0 or 1.

Many reasons why not. I already gave the two primary ones: lack of readability (due to its rare and unexpected use) and lack of usefulness.

If anything, I read your post as an argument against ( W ? X : Y ) = Z. But that has at least some modicum of usefulness.