note Aristotle <blockquote>obscure implementation details</blockquote> Disagree. The shape of booleans in Perl 5 is specified behaviour, and is only going to become more explicit in Perl 6. <blockquote>I would instead suggest that a clearer, more maintainable version might be <tt>($string) x ($cond ? 1 : 0)</tt></blockquote> If you’re using a ternary anyway, why would you want to throw in an <tt>x</tt> op? All that does is lose the shortcircuiting, make the code longer, and force some extraneous parens. Just do all the work using the ternary: <tt>$cond ? $string : ()</tt> <blockquote>I don’t find either of your original “problem” examples to be particularly onerous</blockquote> I’d never use the [doc://push] version. The one with ternaries doesn’t look onerous because there are so many conditional bits that you have no hope of putting it all on a single line anyway, and the lists are simpler than the conditionals, and it’s highly regular, and all. I was trying to come up with an example that can’t be simplified using [doc://grep]. I can’t recall the exact code that led me to post the thread on <tt>perl6-users</tt> which led Larry to nudge me in this direction, but it was a case of injecting a single list into the arguments of a one-liner [doc://join], where precedence forced me to parenthesise things, so the version using the ternary absolutely was more ornery than it should have been. With such a short list, it’s more annoying than the example I gave in the root node, because nothing really helps – putting it on a single line makes it unwieldy, breaking it into multiple lines makes it breathlessly verbose, using an extra temporary looks hackish. Sticking an <tt>x!!</tt> wouldn’t have been ideal, but would certainly read better than all the alternatives. Makeshifts last the longest. 564792 564865