Thank you all for interesting answers and discussion!

>> So why do you complain that the following is onerous?
I wrote that it seems to be basic (basic math function), so that means that it shouldn't introduce by POSIX. Basic math functions I keep: sqrt, abs, ceil/floor, round, (odd/even), sin/cos/tan/ctg, exp, some others. So I dislike Python no less.

>> 2) chomp(@foo); is simpler than @foo = map chomp, @foo;.
I meant "chomp(@foo)" - would do as it did. Only what it return differs. But then we couldn't get last character - that's also bad.

>> Making an exception for length would be bad (very error prone).
Why error-prone? ...And if you use text redactor, you always see "length" same color as other functions and non-barewords.

>> So you'd rather have $array[i][j-1]?
Yes, it would increase readability (if there are many indices, and nested). But sure, I can't suggest anything better.

>> You can: $i > 5 or do {print "No"; last}.
Thanks, I haven't used "... or do ...", but I can't understand why language has two different constructs ("{...}" with and without "do"), and I remembered strange thing about such blocks - that you can't use last (and friends) to escape unless you use {{double block}} (one more exception rule).

>> What did you expect to get from $x = "a"; $x++?
"b". I expect to get "a", if statement would be ($x++)--. I think that if Perl differentiates numerical and string operations writing them by punctuations and letters (e.g. firstly I started to use binary: cmp, le, eq, ne,... and <, =, >=, +, -,...), then it could use something different for string and numeral increment, for example: ++ for numeral, and "up" for string, -- for numeral, "dn"/"dw"/"down" for string.

>> The parser is insanely complicated already, besides what would print 1 + foo(1+1)*2; mean then?
It could be a rule of syntacsis, that function take ALL things till the closing paren (w/o opening paren) or thing that is less tight (or/and). So answer for example would be "print 1 + foo 4", and if we would like to have foo eaten only "(1+1)", then we should write "print 1 + (foo 1+1) * 2". With this rule we could everytime omit the outermost pair of parens.