It does if you realise that that is what is happening in the context of a conditional. From OP's parenthetical comment it is fairly clear that this particular subtlety of Perl (and Perl has a lot of them) had escaped OP.

I thought it worth making clear that there is no syntactic sugar that will allow OP to select a list or scalar context at run time for the call by using the conditional operator in that particular fashion.

Perl is Huffman encoded by design.

In reply to Re^5: Maintaining context of the caller by GrandFather
in thread Maintaining context of the caller by revdiablo

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