Both 1 and 2 looks to me like frivolities without any useful meaning or justification

You and I have vastly differing perceptions of what constitutes normal perl code. For example there are over 700 examples of the 'postfix if on next line' pattern in the .pm files distributed with the perl core.

There doesn't really seem any point in discussing this further. You have failed to convince me, and I am very unlikely to work on this myself or accept such a patch into core.

Dave.