I almost hazarded a similar guess with similar rationale (having to account for an undef result being the destination target for autovivification). My gut reaction to concept is that it's something that I'd likely at least "ding" were I to see it in a code review (conceivably it's similar but shorter for doing an assignment to different places in different legs of an if/else maybe but feels like tending towards obfuscation . . . meh).