Is there any reasoning to not always use parentheses instead?
Yes, clarity and readability.

While I certainly do not endorse memorising the precedence table, I feel non-casual programmers should know the precedence of very commonly used operators. To illustrate, if you follow the "always use parentheses" rule, you'd be obliged to write: 

( my $x ) = ( $y + 42 );

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which I feel is borderline obscene. This is surely more clearly written, without the clutter of parentheses, simply as: 
my $x = $y + 42;

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BTW, I would similarly object to parentheses here in C or in any language where assignment is an operator.

In Perl, I place the ultra low precedence and and or operators in the same category as the = operator, at least for non-novice Perl programmers. Being very low precedence makes them especially well-suited to flow of control, and I agree with Conway that reserving them exclusively for that purpose, for example: 

open(my $fh, '<', $file) or die "error opening '$file': $!";

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or: 
$meaning == 42 or next;

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is idiomatic Perl and makes the code clearer and more enjoyable to read.

In reply to Re^3: Please critique this script -- Read emails and write URLs into bookmarks by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Please critique this script -- Read emails and write URLs into bookmarks by Anonymous Monk

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