To put it another way, though not very well: “TMTOWTDI ... now, pick one.”. It’s okay to have more than one approach to a problem, but not to have two or more syntactically-ambiguous ways to do the same thing.
Every language has its “crufts.” Perl, maybe, has more than a few. But you smile to yourself and say, “that’s just the way it is.” Speaking now purely from a software asset-management point of view, the one thing that I most do not want to see is: “That’s just the way it is, only maybe it isn’t.” Yeah, maybe in retrospect “that way” might not have been aesthetically best, but let’s all just live with it, for the sake of millions of lines already written. Don’t gratuitously tweak the compiler and then add an on/off switch to your tweak. Well-intentioned though your efforts might be, that just adds headache without aspirin. Now, within a massive block of source-code, we now have two different ways being done to accomplish the same thing in not quite the same way. Uh uh. Don’t do that to me...
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