JavaFan,
I really don't mean to sound flippant but did you even read my node?

I was showing that perl doesn't issue a warning any time it sees an assignment in a conditional - only when it makes sense. This was intended for others reading along, not for you since you obviously know what you are talking about.

This is actually a common idiom, so it would be wrong for Perl to warn. Note that swapping the arguments around won't help you either: ... may be valid (if foo() returns an lvalue).

Yep, exactly what I said. Perl assumes you know what you are doing and when flipping operands, an error would happen unless there was an lvalue at play.