japhy writes:

$y ||= 10;

FWIW, be careful with that. Using ||= is one of my favorite ways to write fluent Perl, but it just got me burned a few days ago.

The problem was that the $y I was initializing was a numeric value - but zero was an acceptable value.

In that case, my ||= was overriding the supplied value of zero, which tested false against the operator. In the example here, providing an argument of 0 for $y will result in $y getting 10, not zero.

Oops. :-)

Peace,
-McD