Thanks monks for all of the insight and advice, it's all most appreciated. I guess bottom-line is as advised, the inline statements are only for simple cases.
In general I want my code to look more like an sentance than code, like Englishizing:
if ( $cat ) {
$dog='onALert';
}
to
$dog='onALert' if $cat;
its so much cleaner, easier to read. It would be even nicer if "is" could substitute for =", (sort of like SQL "is NULL") then:
$dog is 'onALert' if $cat;
$dog is 'sleeping' unless $cat;
Nice!
Thanks guys for the insight- I'm just syntax-surfing techniques to pretify my code...