From what i can tell, the occurrences were not being used for any kind of magic or misfeatures. They are used to just get a value to assign from a method when some related variable(s) are usable (object passes defined test, variable is true or defined, etc).

As for your proposed syntax near the end of your post, well, my changes are also on the same lines.

In reply to Re^2: "my $p = value if condition()" as bad|deprecated as "my $p if 0" (worse) by parv
in thread "my $p = value if condition()" as bad|deprecated as "my $p if 0" (Naughty indeed) by parv

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