Others have pointed out better ways of doing this; for the record I'll just explain how Perl was seeing your code. Perl expects an expression to follow 'or', so 
... or { ....; ... }

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is interpreted as an anonymous hash constructor, and the semicolon in the middle of it is then a syntax error. Also, no-one seems to have mentioned 'do'; this allows you to use a block of code as an expression, eg 
.... or do { statement; statment; statement_with_final_value }

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But most of the time you're still better off using if/else.

Dave.

In reply to Re: Nested OR as a control structure by dave_the_m
in thread Nested OR as a control structure by andyf

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