> I had known of this before, and I'm fairly certain I've used it before.

I consider myself pretty liberal when it comes to coding standards and being clever, but this is something that will badly piss me off. I can't quite put my finger on why I feel so, considering I am perfectly fine with most of the perl tricks. For example, https://gist.github.com/3392206 looks good to me(you are using Perl, you should know about list and scalar contexts).