Larry Wall had a linguistic background, so perl tends to allow English-like syntax. For example in English we might say:

Let's have a picnic tomorrow, unless it rains.
Lets have a picnic every day next week.

which correspond in perl to:

have_picnic($tomorrow) unless $it_rains;
have_picnic($_) for @days;
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But in English, such suffix modifiers don't stack well:

Lets have a picnic every day next week unless it rains.

If it rains on the first day, do we cancel just that day or the whole week?

So Larry, for linguistic reasons, limited perl to a single statement modifier.

Dave.