But the complete novice or maintainer may not know the footbrake exists.
It's fair point around here but for novice or unperlish programmer using a = sign in the statement indicates there is an assignment going on. One of the problems/benefits of Perl is the number of unique programming concepts it has and defaults you need to learn. In my opinion Perl code is not of a high standard unless it's unreadable to a non Perl programmer. Anyway it's an old argument, I think even $_ is unreadable but I realise it has it's benefits. Especially for for the experts:)