Oliver Steele

Hmm, now that I come back to look at it with fresh mind, it occurs to me that I led me reduce abstraction ad absurdum the moment I used eval (which, for non-Perl folks, means the same here as try in other languages) – and I might as well have written

my $name = eval { $product->offering->merchant->name };

To keep with reduce, it would have to be something like $a && $a->$b() as the reduce block.