how many times you corrected missing semicolon in your Perl scripts the last week

After running the code - never. All the IDEs I use for all the languages I use flag missing semi-colons and other similar foibles (like mis-matched brackets.

There are nasty languages that I use occasionally, and even some respectable ones, that need to quote new lines to extend a statement across multiple lines. That is just nasty on so many levels. I very much agree with dsheroh that long lines are anathema. Code becomes much harder to read and understand when lines are long and statements are not chunked nicely.

Don't break what's not broken!