[manicdee]

And yet most Perl programmers I know do not work in mailing houses so they have never needed to use “...”.

I have worked with brilliant people who still have trouble figuring out the ternary operator, and people who should know better who construct ternary operators with five levels of parentheses, causing deciphering of the intent to be impossible.

So I choose Alexander the Great’s approach to solving the Gordian Knot: slice it open and remove the complexity to multiple layers that mere mortals can understand.

PS: I notice you failed to explain the operator yourself. Minus five points to Slytherin.