I think we mostly agree.

I read up the WP pages on statement and expression and it becomes clear that it's far easier to make a distinction in languages like C.

But Perl took also a lot from Lisp, where everything is an expression returning a value.

Quote: "In languages that mix imperative and functional styles, such as the Lisp family, the distinction between expressions and statements is not made: even expressions executed in sequential contexts solely for their side effects and whose return values are not used are considered 'expressions'"

So Perl's if is an expression, especially when executed in a scalar or list context due to a surrounding do.

And it's also a statement, because

Update

OTOH does A and B (= do { if (A) {B} } ) have the side-effect of flow-control, because it's short-circuiting.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice

In reply to Re^17: printing unitialized value of the 'do BLOCK' (EXPRESSION vs TERM vs STATEMENT) by LanX
in thread printing unitialized value of the 'do BLOCK' by rsFalse

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