true. but look at the snippet again and try your code:

$ perl -Mstrict -w
(1==1) or dir( "hello" );

$ perl -Mstrict -w
(1==0) or dir("hello");
Undefined subroutine &main::dir called at - line 1.
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Luck's played a big part here and the conditional statement has never been exercised (unless of course dir is defined somewhere). The parens counter the 'use strict' which checks for the use of barewords as subs.

-derby