OK, once I knew what the answer was... it helped me find the answer in a manual. From 'Programming Perl, 2nd Edition', pp 92-93. It lists the assignment operators, including = and ||=, and says 
List assignment may be done only with the plain assignment operator, =
+.  In a list context, list assignment returns the list of new values 
+just as scalar assignment does. ...

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In reply to Re^2: ||= oddity by throop
in thread ||= oddity by throop

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