my understanding is that or was added as an alternative to || primarily for flow control purposes in constructs such as open my $file, '<', 'somefile.txt' or die; where the high precedence of || would cause unexpected issues.

While the Perl documentation does mention flow control uses (and I am guilty of using it that way), not all programming languages guarantee the order in which terms are evaluated, or even short-cutting.

In any case, or is named for a logic operation, not a flow control operation. So, would be better if we used if (or unless) instead of or for flow control.

Update:

Another thought: Just as if (and unless) can be used as a modifier, else could be used as a modifier. That would be clear indication of intent.

Unfortunately, unlikely an else modifier would be added to Perl. The devs would likely say "Just use or"

In reply to Re^6: next unless condition by RonW
in thread next unless condition by hankcoder

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