Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.
Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?
I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role. Being a stubborn cuss is a trait.
And in the limiting case where the optimizer is completely broken because it’s not implemented yet, we get to work around that too. Optionally...
We don’t have enough parallel universes to allow all uses of all junction types – in the absence of quantum computing the combinatorics are not in our favor...
Symmetry is overrated. Overrated is symmetry.
In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency.
Now, I’m not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things.
And don’t tell me there isn’t one bit of difference between null and space, because that’s exactly how much difference there is.
And besides, if Perl really takes off in the Windows space, I think the rest of us would just as soon have a double-agent within ActiveState.
The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.
Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.
That which hits the fan tends to get flung in all directions.
One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.
The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they’re all inconsistent with each other.
To ordinary folks, conversion is not always automatic. It’s something that may or may not require explicit assistance. See Billy Graham.
Being famous has its benefits, but fame isn’t one of them.
It’s hard to tune heavily tuned code.
Even the White House has a press agent.
Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse.