in reply to Using IF and OR, I'm sure there is a better way

In Perl 5.10, you'll be able to do: 
    use feature '~~';
    if ($variable ~~ [1,2,3]) { ... }

[download]
which will indeed short-circuit.

(I'm backporting the Perl 6 "smart match" operator to Perl 5.)

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom