Or wait... what are the rules on this one again?

$foo //= '';

demonstrations of nifty code are cool but i prefer to focus on readability.

When it comes to my Perl scripts, I usually think the same. I mostly use PHP for display and Perl for processing, so speed isn't AS critical with Perl. This means that I can stand to live with a little bit of bloat there.

But it was only a year or two ago that you guys showed me ? and $foo = $blah ? $lorem : $ipsum, and now I can read them just as clearly as anything else. So I figure that I might as well learn whatever exists, and if it's easier than great! If not, no biggie.

So as far as I can tell, these are essentially the same:

if (!$foo) { $foo = 'bar; }
$foo = $foo ? $foo : 'bar';
$foo = $foo // 'bar';
$foo //= 'bar';

Using $foo = $foo || 'bar'; is similar, but apparently not exactly the same:

[perldoc.perl.org...]

Am I correct that these are identical?

# old
if ($arr{'checkid'}) { $val = $arr{'checkid'}; }
elsif($foreign && !$val) { $val = 'foreign'; }
else { $val = '1'; }

# new
$val = $arr{'checkid'} //
 ($foreign && !$val) ? 'foreign' : '1';

Preliminary tests show the same result.

At this point this is just an exercise, but it cuts the code in half. So if I'm right that they're the same then I think I could easily get used to the second version.