Not very surprising that you think that way.

How about the value of verbosity?

$ perl -we '
use strict;
my @array=(1,2);
my $matches = 0;
for my $ea (1..3) {
  $matches = grep {
    printf("idx: %d, val: %d == %d? %3s, ",
      $_, $array[$_], $ea, ($array[$_] == $ea) ? "YES" : "NO");
    $array[$_] == $ea; 
  } (0..$#array);
  print "matches: $matches\n";
}
'

__output__
idx: 0, val: 1 == 1? YES, idx: 1, val: 2 == 1?  NO, matches: 1
idx: 0, val: 1 == 2?  NO, idx: 1, val: 2 == 2? YES, matches: 1
idx: 0, val: 1 == 3?  NO, idx: 1, val: 2 == 3?  NO, matches: 0
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and who ever said Perl was not readable... :)