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What kind of syntactic sugar is available in Perl to reduce code for l/rvalue operators vs. if statements?

Asked 2011-10-17T16:08:19.737
15

There's a bunch out there, as Perl is a pretty sugary language, but the most used statements in any language is the combination of if statements and setting values. I think I've found many of them, but there's still a few gaps. Ultimately, the goal would be to not have to write a variable name more than once:

Here's what I have so far:

$r ||= $s;          # $r = $s unless ($r);
$r //= $s;          # $r = $s unless (defined $r);
$r &&= $s;          # $r = $s if ($r);
$r = $c ? $s : $t;  # if ($c) { $r = $s } else { $r = $t }
$c ? $r : $s = $t;  # if ($c) { $r = $t } else { $s = $t }
$r = $s || $t;      # if ($s) { $r = $s } else { $r = $t }
$r = $s && $t;      # if ($s) { $r = $t } else { $r = $s = undef, 0, untrue, etc. }
$c and return $r;   # return $r if ($c);
$c or  return $r;   # return $r unless ($c);
$c and $r = $s;     # $r = $s if ($c);
@$r{qw(a b c d)}    # ($r->{a}, $r->{b}, $r->{c}, $r->{d})

Somebody also had a really interesting article on a "secret operator", shown here:

my @part = (
    'http://example.net/app',
    ( 'admin'  ) x!! $is_admin_link,
    ( $subsite ) x!! defined $subsite,
    $mode,
    ( $id      ) x!! defined $id,
    ( $submode ) x!! defined $submode,
);

However, what I've found to be missing from the list is:

$r <= $s;                 # read as "$r = min($r, $s);" except with short-circuiting
$r = $s if (defined $s);  # what's the opposite of //?
$r and return $r          # can that be done without repeating $r?

Is there anything else worth adding? What other conditional set variables are available to reduce the code? What else is missing?

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There's also:

$hash{$key||'foo'} = 1;  # if($key) { $hash{$key} = 1 } else { $hash{'foo'} = 1 }
answered 2011-10-19T22:47:03.590

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