I never lost sight of the fact that this was about readability, hence my two initial points

use of ? would add ambiguity (the antithesis of readability)

Incredibly_long_sentence_like_function_names are not readable and if you need/insist on that sort of large definition for something I think OO is a better route.

And yet when lachoy makes the second point here it isn't so difficult to accept.

--
perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"