Odd, considering the nature of Perl as a language?

Not really.. Perl is a high-level language, and high-level languages don't spend much time making the underlying theory visible. Pretty much the opposite, in fact.

High-level languages make the things programmers are most likely to do as easy to do as possible. If that means hiding a vast amount of complexity under the rug, so much the better.

In terms of programming theory, the statement:

    $x++;
[download]

is one of the most complicated things you can do. I'll explain why in future posts, but we have a hell of a lot of territory to cover before we get to a machine sophisticated enough to implement that command.

Nobody wants to do that much work every time they need to increment a counter. We just want to say, "make $x bigger" and let the machine work out all the gory details. And that's what high-level languages are for.