Question

I know a great thing about perl is that there’s multiple ways of doing a lot of things, and I was wondering, What’s the best (most efficient, most realiable, faster) way to assign a value to a variable that’s false (0, empty string, undef, etc), some I know are:

if ( ! $x ) {
    $x = 1;
} 
# or $x = 1 if ( ! $x );

$x = $x || 1;

$x = 1 unless $x;

$x ||= 1;

Is there a better option?

Answer 1

$x ||= $default;

is short, clear, fast and commonly used (i.e. readable).