in reply to Using scalar values as conditionals
"...and why it would be used..."
Consider the situation where it's expensive to get to the value of $is_bigger. Like for instance getting the information from a database, from an external file or prompting the user. If you then need to test it a number of times, it makes sense to 'remember' the value of $is_bigger.
Everything went worng, just as foreseen.
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