Absolutely agree. Personally I find: the Perl way of doing things is either while() or for (@list). This is for a variety of reasons.

First of all, if you have a loop, it should be obvious that it is a loop. (To take it to extremes, that's what BASIC's GOSUB did wrong - it is a subroutine call, but the called place doesn't look like a subroutine.)

Also, the for(;;) form is to be avoided; most of the time you can write it as for (@list). Perl understands the notion of a list natively so you should not concern yourself with index variables. This eliminates an entire class of coding errors - the fencepost errors which consist in mostly overlooking nasty special conditions that result in the loop executing once more or less than it should. for(;;) also is inefficient (internally, it is handled like a while () {} continue {} construct).

{ ... ; redo } has its place just like for(;;) is occasionally useful - but for the sake of your own sanity you should not make either of them a habit.

And here's the benchmark to prove it:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Benchmark;
Benchmark::cmpthese(10_000, {
    'C-style' => sub { for (my $i = 0; $i <= 1000; $i++){ undef } },
    'foreach' => sub { for my $i (0..1000) { undef } }
});
__END__
Benchmark: timing 10000 iterations of C-style, foreach...
   C-style:  5 wallclock secs ( 5.20 usr +  0.00 sys =  5.20 CPU) @ 19
+23.08/s (n=10000)
   foreach:  4 wallclock secs ( 3.73 usr +  0.00 sys =  3.73 CPU) @ 26
+80.97/s (n=10000)
        Rate   C-style foreach
C-style 1923/s      --    -28%
foreach 2681/s     39%      --
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By the way: does perl have absolutely _no_ optimisation for for (;;) without any expressions in its parens? I find that a bit hard to believe.

2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas'
Segmentation fault
2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$
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$ perl -MO=Deparse -e "while(1){die}"
for (;;) {
    die;
}
-e syntax OK
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which tells me that Perl considers while(1) and for(;;) to be the same, which means it does optimize for(;;) into a simple infinite loop.
        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")