All this chinese makes me jump in my goalseeking time machine, set the goal for "why did we ever want $, @, %?" and press the start button.

As the smoke clears from the TARDIS console, I find myself somewhere in Bell labs in the late sixties, when, along with hard rock, the unix shell was invented and variable names had to have a different syntax to filenames (a note to myself:nothing to do with reserved words after all).

Pressing the next button jumps me forward twenty years or so, when suddenly Perl is invented and needs to have a syntax for arrays and hashes.

But where is postfix? Not in this causality chain, so I reset the console and land somewhere in Palo Alto instead , where in a parallel Universe, a postfix addict invents Java ('.' instead of '->').

Suddenly, time and space collapse in causality violation and I am left asking myself whether the $ # % was a good idea in the first place.

Given that & is enough to distinguish function calls from variable references, and that the shell doesn't get its hands on the Perl code, it seems to me that maybe Perl could have borrowed this part of the syntax from C instead of shell in the first place? But trying to make Perl look like Java won't help that, in my opinion.