I tested my all of my perl code that was handy with this script:

#!/usr/bin/perl -ln

$arrow  += () = /->/g;
$period += () = /\./g;

END {
    print "arrows occured $arrow times";
    print "periods occured $period times";
}
[download]

and got these results:

arrows occured 454 times
periods occured 227 times

Now Perl has always been Huffman encoded (things used often should require less work than things done seldomly) so '.' (or some other one character operator) should replace '->'. When they went looking for a replacement they noticed that almost everyone else in the known world was using '.'. There are also other features in Perl 6 that cut down on the number of concats needed.