Looking through perlop I found an example showing one nastiness:
@info = stat($file) || die; # oops, scalar sense of stat!
@info = stat($file) or die; # better, now @info gets its due
I guess an equivalent to your situation might be:
my @Candidates = @_ or return;
my @Candidates = @_ || return;
The second will return undef or set the only element of @Candidates to the number of arguments passed in. So in effect 'or' is allowing operators, including assignments, to be completely evaluated, without inducing any side-effects.
