Why does Perl use the empty string to represent the boolean false value?

Question

When evaluating an expression in a scalar (boolean) context, Perl uses the explicit value 1 as a result if the expression evaluates to true and the empty string

Answer 1

Both number 0 and empty string ultimately evaluate as false in Perl. I think this is a matter of language design. When writing your own code, you can of course assume any which one false encoding convention.

For further details, check out "How do I use boolean variables in Perl?".