Despite all the splendor of the ternary operator, you could also use logical operators:

$foo && print $a or print $b;

Note the precedence of the operators. This code does something very different:

$foo and print $a || print $b;

In any case, I'd use the ?: approach.

Update:

merlyn corrected that in about two seconds! I now have even better reason to stand by my intuition that ?: is a better way to go.

So, in light of his comment you'd really need to do some ooogly thing like:

 ($foo and print $a or 1) or print $b;

Just use the ternary.

TGI says moo