http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=812985

JadeNB has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

After reading Conditional Operator, and delighting in the potential for unreadable code coming from using a conditional operator as an lvalue, I wondered how far in advance the lvalues have to be declared.

Huh? Well, we know that

my ( $c, $d ); 1 ? $c : $d = 'Hi';
is the same (to B::Deparse) as
my ( $c, $d ); $c = 'Hi';
but what if you don't want to declare the variables in advance? Well,
my $d; 1 ? my $c : $d = 'Hi';
is the same as
my $d; my $c = 'Hi';
In the other direction, here's a strict-safe program that B::Deparse makes non-strict-safe:
$ perl -MO=Deparse -e 'my $c; 1 ? $c : my $d; $d' my $c; $c; $d; -e syntax OK
*. How about if we declare both variables in the conditional?
$ perl -e '1 ? my $c : my $d' Invalid separator character '$' in attribute list at -e line 1, near " +$c : my " Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
Now, maybe there's some reason that parsing : my $d as an attribute list is good, or at least expected; but I can't see why 1 ? my $c : my $d would be parsed that way, but 1 ? my $c : $d wouldn't. Would somemonk enlighten me?

UPDATE: * Notice that B::Deparse changes the semantics here (but I guess there's always the disclaimer that that might happen). For example,

our $d = 'Out'; { 1 ? 0 : my $d; $d = 'In'; } say $d;
prints Out, but is converted by B::Deparse into
our $d = 'Out'; { '???'; $d = 'In'; } say $d;
which prints In.

UPDATE: Oh, maybe it's that a colon followed by whitespace and an alphanumeric is always interpreted as the beginning of an attribute list, even if we're waiting for the interstitial colon of a conditional operator. Is this correct? If so, is it the desired behaviour? If so, should the precedence table in perlop be changed to reflect it?