This is some weird looking code and appears to contain at least one error. To have a clear, concise algorithm, I would go up one level in problem statement and start with the intent of the program in general words.

my %Y;
while (<>) {
  ...
  my ($y) = ... ;
  next unless $y;
  
  # Add the scalar number of elements in @ARGV to the hash
  # Always add at least 1 to the hash even if @ARGV contains
  # no elements
  # the value $y is meaningless and plays no role
  
  if(@ARGV) {
      # next is always executed regardless of $y eq $_
      foreach (@ARGV) { $Y{$y}++,next if $y eq $_;  }
  } else { $Y{$y}++ }
}

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So, this single statement is possible:

scalar @ARGV ? $Y{$y} += @ARGV : $Y{$y}++;

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1. The comma operator serves no purpose in the above code. Prefer ; instead.
2. If you want the test to short circuit, then it should go first, not last!:
foreach (@ARGV) { next if $y eq $_; # don't count any occurrences of
                                    # $y
                  $Y{$y}++,
                }

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Or, this is a possibly of what was meant:

scalar @ARGV ? $Y{$y} += (grep $y ne $_, @ARGV) : $Y{$y}++; Without some more English language explanation, I have no idea what the code is supposed to do.

In reply to Re: Code review by Marshall
in thread Code review by Anonymous Monk

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