Hello All, relatively new to Perl, but have been programming for ages. One thing bothers me a bit, as I can't see why the following line of code would throw an interpreter warning (useless use of hash in void context...)

my $foo = (defined($some_hash{bar}) and $some_hash{bar}));

Obviously the above can be re-written with the ternary operator quite easily:

my $foo = defined($some_hash{bar}) ? $some_hash{bar} : 0;

So I'm not really asking /how/ to solve this issue (another three solutions have presented themselves just in the time it took to type this), I would just like to know /why/ this occurs. Is it just a stupid interpreter, or is there some danger in treating your Perl vars like this? I figured Perl's loose typing might let me get away with such extremely lazy evaluations.

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