I don't think there's any support for the idea that until the Perl6 effort, Perl was anything but ad hoc design.
Compare it to a real example of ad hoc language design: PHP.
In reply to Re^3: Trinary Operator Semantics
by chromatic
in thread Trinary Operator Semantics
by hardburn
| For: | Use: | ||
| & | & | ||
| < | < | ||
| > | > | ||
| [ | [ | ||
| ] | ] |