After working for a while with Perl "programmers" which were mostly converted PHP-hackers and quickly trained sociologists (both with an experimental approach to Perl) I got very cautious about production code. (Especially because everybody was allowed to change and commit into any project... )

So there is a personal preference and a $work preference...

Part 1

So clearly (a) is better as long as speed doesn't matter, even for me the $_ => 0 part evidently signals a hash assignment to my visual cortex. And this construct is easily changed to other meanings.

The only exclusion to that rule may be this idiom @ntests{@tests} = ()
to assign undef.

Anyway in aforementioned work context even map was risky.¹

So maybe

   my %ntests;
   $ntests{$_}=0 for @tests;
[download]

would cause the least problems.

Part 2

For me (a) is an obfuscation hack. It goes to deep into brain loops about numeric type casting.

So this time (b) for me.

At $work (where the word "ternary" provoked empty glares¹) maybe rather:

   my $mol = "";
   $mol = "forty two" if $n==42;
[download]

HTH! :)

¹) It hurts, I know!

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

Outside of code tags, you may need to use entities for some characters:

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.