are you thinking about overloading the ?? operator?

No. The point was simply that if you don't know perl, both those things are likely to be unreadable.

I fail to see a reason why nested function calls might be detrimental from a robustness point of view though.

Reductio ad absurdum, dear boy, reductio ad absurdum!

You're taking my post far too seriously at the microscopic level; and ignoring forgetting my point at the macroscopic level.

Personally, I always feel a strange tingling when using "@expand_me", and I do so only in very basic situations and temporary print statements for debugging. I prefer Ovid's way in code that has a longer lifespan.

I can't say it better than I did in my next post in this thread: Being selective about what functionality you accept as legitimate, and what you personally choose to reject is one thing; attempting to impose your affectations upon the world at large is another. If you haven't read it, that same post goes into much more detail of my feelings about selectivity.

I have no problem with your or Ovid's preferences -- I have my own -- but I do have a problem with Ovid's (and most other) justifications for rejecting parts of the language: ... nobody knows what $" is, but everyone knows what join() is.

This is where I set the line between idiomatic and idiotic.

I wish I said that. Then again, I probably will :)