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I’m not a native speaker, but I always liked the postfix “unless” in Perl, for use with operations that are performed in the common case and only omitted under special circumstances.

    do_something() unless special_condition;
It vibes with “unless” in English usually implying an exception.


PERL was too clever by half, but if you leaned into making it readable, there were lots of tricks that could help.

    do_register() unless invalid()
    do_send_email() unless email_down()
    do_login() unless password_to_short()
... it wouldn't be the way you'd do it today, but if used "tastefully", they were helpful!




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