I must admit that I'm a little surprised myself, but it turns out that or's precedence is so low that it is actually lower than return (probably because return is treated as a list operator). Which leads to the following result:

perl -MO=Deparse -e "sub test { return int(rand(2)) or print 'Nope' }"
sub test {
    print 'Nope' unless return int rand 2;
}
-e syntax OK
[download]

I'm pretty sure this is not what you meant, because this would somehow try to do something in the sub after returning from it. I'm also not exactly sure what the return value of return itself would be :P.

Two ways to do what you want (beyond the one you already proposed), either with a temp variable:

my $result;
$result = something() or croak "Something went wrong";
return $result;
[download]

Or, if this is the last line of your sub, you could remove the return altogether (if that's compatible with your coding rules):

sub mySub
{
  ...
  something() or croak "Times are a'croaking";
}
[download]

The right way is the one that you like the most (again, respecting whatever coding rules should apply).

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