I'll keep this short for the sake of poetry. :-)

This "phenomenon" is, in fact, understandable (and even expected): since Perl is a sufficiently high level language, you can write shorter programs, with each syntactic part of the phrases having a lot of semantic importance for the whole communication.

In any context where you have a high level use of a given language (including here the natural languages), you put a lot of burden of the interpretation process in the receiving part.

In the case of human languages, this is obvious: many figures of speech (e.g., metaphors), while powerful and, at the same time, terse, require a deeper understanding of the language from the reader/listener.

So is the case of Perl: depending on your use of Perl, the perl interpreter has to do a lot of hard work to keep your "freedom of speech" (or poetry, if you will).

Cheers, Roger...

In reply to RE: proof that perl is poetry (?) by rbrito
in thread proof that perl is poetry (?) by mcwee

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