Well, here's what the perlop manpage says:

As more readable alternatives to && and || when used for control flow, Perl provides and and or operators (see below). The short-circuit behavior is identical. The precedence of ``and'' and ``or'' is much lower, however, so that you can safely use them after a list operator without the need for parentheses:

    unlink "alpha", "beta", "gamma"
            or gripe(), next LINE;
[download]

With the C-style operators that would have been written like this:

    unlink("alpha", "beta", "gamma")
            || (gripe(), next LINE);
[download]

So in other words, if you said this:

unlink "alpha", "beta", "gamma" || gripe();
[download]

the third argument to unlink would be "gamma" || gripe(); that is, always "gamma" and gripe() would never be evaluated.

'or' is smarter than that. Look at C-style Logical Or and Logical or and Exclusive or on the perlop manpage. It talks a bit about why this happens.

local $_ = "0A72656B636148206C72655020726568746F6E41207473754A";
while(s/..$//) { print chr(hex($&)) }
[download]

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.