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

Here is how I got around the problem:

my $res = ($a eq $b) *1;

The *1 converts the boolean resulting from ($a eq $b) into a scalar.