Nitpicking on the HMD/HND example: It gives a compile time error, too.

I haven't answered your question about the "why" yet.

There is this special member of the Perl ecosphere called filehandle. It is special, it needs to be treated special and it is eye-catching. Beneath scalars, arrays, hashes and subs it is something "primal" in Perl. I just like filehandles and I thought they were there to be used.

OTOH, reflecting all your points makes me thoughtful. Using the idiom given by Your Mother in Re: lexical vs. local file handles solves the one case where a bareword seemed to be of advantage.

I really should abandon this habit. Thanks for your input and your patience.

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