The requirement was 1 statement w/o parens.

Why?

what possible reason could there be for it not to change?

Why would it? To satisfy your personal and unreasonable requirement to avoid typing two characters in what is in itself, a very infrequently used construct.

1. 10s or 100s of thousands of programmers have written millions of Perl programs without this ever being an issue worthy of messing with the precedence table.

   Why are you having so much of a problem with it?

2. In every situation where one might do this, there is a better alternative already existing.

   Eg:

   [0] Perl> printf "%*s\n", $_ *2+4, 'fred' for 1 .. 10;;
     fred
       fred
         fred
           fred
             fred
               fred
                 fred
                   fred
                     fred
                       fred
   [download]

Are you saying Perl is a Dead language?

Certainly not. And throwing straw men into other peoples mouths is a silly tactic.

Are you saying that this change will suddenly make Perl hip again?

Will it make PHP, Javascript, Ruby, Java, Go, Dart, ... programmers abandon their current langauges of choice and flock to Perl's door?

And if they did, would that improve my lot? Or yours?

Why wouldn't it change?

Because even if the change of precedence would alleviate a pair of parens in this one situation without affecting existing statements of a similar type -- and I'm far from convinced you've thought that through thoroughly -- how about the knock on affects of that change of precedence upon numbers and strings in other situations; those not using the x operator. Have you even begun to consider how they will affect existing code?

Unless you're suggesting that the precedence only change for this one specific type of expression -- which would be even sillier.

I strongly hope that this will be dismissed as an idea very quickly. We've had enough ill-thought through language changes over the last few major versions that have subsequently had to be deprecated. We don't need more of the same for such pointless reasons as avoiding a pair of parens.