Good question.

It is documented in perlop, so it theoretically should be an operator. OTOH it certainly works like a function.

It is supposed to be lower precedence than a list operator. At least it is documented that way. So at one point someone had in mind what that was supposed to mean. But I am having some trouble (OK, a lot of trouble) figuring out how to write code that could test for that and demonstrate a difference...

Very specifically, could anyone figure out some sample code that distinguishes between not and my_not after the following code? (Other than the name and games with overrides.)

sub my_not ($) { shift ? "" : 1; }
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I certainly can't...