Is your question about style, or about behavior? There's nothing surprising to me about the behaviors you're describing, but maybe there's an expectations vs reality gap.

You can use Devel::Peek to inspect the actual contents of a scalar.

You can use perldata to learn about what Perl sees as truth and falsehood.

You can refer to perlop to see the precedence list, where || is lower than +.

You can use perl -MO=Deparse,-p,-x9 -e 'print "we have ", ($fo + 2 || 8), " beans";' to see how that parses, and how precedence rules apply. That last one produces:

perl -MO=Deparse,-p,-x9 -e 'print "we have ", ($fo + 2 || 8), " beans"
+;'
print('we have ', (($fo + 2) || 8), ' beans');
-e syntax OK

[download]

Dave

In reply to Re: conditional print. Is correct to use it? by davido
in thread conditional print. Is correct to use it? by pvaldes

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