Due to the low precedence of the ‘or’ operator, or3 parses as follows:
sub or3 {
my ($a,$b) = @_;
(return $a) or $b;
}
The usual advice is to only use the ‘or’ operator for control flow:
@info = stat($file) or die;
For more discussion, see the perl manual: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Logical-or-and-Exclusive-Or