I wasn't suggesting that it was easy to search for. In fact, the entire issue ought to be more searchable; it's a question that gets asked here often. I don't know of a perlfaq that covers it, but it's one of those things that comes up often enough it should be part of the FAQ.

I probably should have been more specific. What I meant was that perlsyn is one of the top ten 'must read' documents for someone using Perl. perlintro, perlsyn, perlop, perlvar, perlsub, perldata, perlre... ok, that's top seven. ;)

"Why is my( $variable ) = 'something' if $condition; almost certainly an error?" seems like a very good candidate entry for perlfaq7, though. ;)