perl - If statement with scalar conditional -

i having difficulty understanding following expression in perl.

 (my $attempts = 0; $attempts < $maxatt; $attempts++) {             print "please try again.\n" if $attempts;             print "$prompt: ";             $response = readline(*stdin);             chomp($response);             return $response if $response;     } 

what mean use scalar conditional? i.e. makes return true vs false? assuming statement reads if ($attempts) { print ... }.

perl doesn't have distinct concept of "boolean value".

per the perldata manpage:

a scalar value interpreted false in boolean sense if undefined, null string or number 0 (or string equivalent, "0"), , true if else. boolean context special kind of scalar context no conversion string or number ever performed.

so in example, if $attempts means if $attempts > 0.

incidentally, means $attempts > 0 not evaluate boolean, because there's no such thing. instead, per the perlop manpage, operators >:

[…] return 1 true , special version of defined empty string, "", counts 0 exempt warnings improper numeric conversions, "0 true" is.

(hat-tip ikegami pointing out return false not quite normal empty string.)