Yup! Larry certainly designed most of Perl intelligently enough. In some ways, it makes the areas where he didn't more jarring, because they're unexpected, and thus confusing. And by the way, thanks, Larry! :-)

It's a small nit, but the nits add up. The more of them we can clean up, the better.

Yes, it's a flaw. What is there to do about it? Break backward-compatibility? That would be a worse flaw.

Yup. It doesn't have to be a flaw: we can deprecate the feature, like we've done in the past.

Just add a warning like: "$x .. $y better written as flip_flop($x,$y)" for flip flops. Put in an explanation that flip flops must be written explictly so that they're not confused with the range operator, and in a few years, we could remove the feature entirely.

Remember, effort at development time is easy. Until the program is put in production, it can be changed without impacting end users. Effort at mainenance time is hard; any change to the program will have to be analysed for it's impact on the end users. Fixing bugs is easy; finding bugs is hard. Giving the users one less bug is worth it, IMHO.

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Ytrew