If your version of Perl is recent enough, you can do:
my $first = param('first') // 'notentered';
Jeff japhy Pinyan,
P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.:
Perl,
regex,
and perlhacker How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart
Comment on Re: CGI.pm accepting a 0 as a value, not null