But an assignment doesn't make much sense, in this case. Assignment in an if-condition is useful only if you need to reuse that condition value, e.g. instead of

if (complicated == condition) {
    do something with the same complicated == condition
}
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we can write

$value = complicated == condition;
if ($value) {
    do something with the same $value
}
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or shorter, similiar to your code:

if ($value = complicated == condition) {
    do something with the same $value
}
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so that one doesn't need parse the complicated == condition again to see that it's the same in both places. But in your example that would be pointless because what I dubbed "complicated == condition" is just a single value which seems to remain unchanged.

And now for something completely different: In the OP, you mentioned a library. Have you heard about / looked into Koha, an open source LMS written in Perl?