Well, I'm sure someone else can explain better and more technically correct, but I imagine it must have to do with the fact that you can define subroutines in perl at runtime, via things like 'do', 'require', 'eval', so perl can't check at compile-time whether a certain function-call will be defined or not when it is called... says me: "C wouldn't let you do that!" (i.e. it's a feature!)