After noting that:

The && and || operators differ from C’s in that, rather than returning 0 or 1, they return the last value evaluated.

the Camel Book (4th Edition, 2012, page 120) goes on to explain that the || operator imposes scalar context on its left operand to facilitate chaining in assignment:

...this has the delightful result that you can select the first of a series of scalar values that happens to be true. Thus, a reasonably portable way to find out the user’s home directory might be: 
my $home = $ENV{HOME}
        || $ENV{LOGDIR}
        || (getpwuid($<)[7]
        || die "You're homeless!\n";

[download]
On the other hand, since the left argument is always evaluated in scalar context, you can’t use || for selecting between two aggregates for assignment: 
@a = @b || @c;            # This doesn't do the right thing
@a = scalar(@b) || @c;    # because it really means this.
@a = @b ? @b : @c;        # This works fine though.

[download]

(There is a truncated version of this explanation in Logical Defined Or in perlop, but the Camel Book is clearer.)

As tobyink noted above, scalar context is not imposed on the right operand.

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

In reply to Re^4: map BLOCK evaluation context by Athanasius
in thread map BLOCK evaluation context by vsespb

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