Well, *I* would want Perl to accept this. Either by just DWIM (heh, if it can figure out what is wanted when giving the error message, why not just f*cking do it? If I wanted Pythonesque behaviour, I would have run python), or by just not doing anything special.

Preferably the former.

IMO, it's ok for a language to say "look buddy, I do not know what you mean here". But languages that say "oh, I know exactly what you mean, but I'm not going to do it because you didn't use some magic incantation" have no business to exists outside fora like the hates-software mailing list.