I'm making a data structure and I don't want any empty keys. This code works: $a->{'b'}=$b if $b; The problem is that's way too verbose... and the real code is much uglier than that. I was wondering if there's some great shortcut operator. I got excited about ||=, but it's not really the samething. ? and : don't exactly work either. The point is to have no key 'b' exist if $b is false.