context

The surroundings, or environment. The context given by the surrounding code determines what kind of data a particular "expression" is expected to return. The three primary contexts are "list context", "scalar context", and "void context". Scalar context is sometimes subdivided into "Boolean context", "numeric context", "string context", and "void context". There's also a "don't care" scalar context (which is dealt with in Programming Perl, Third Edition, Chapter 2, "Bits and Pieces" if you care).