Humans have a wonderful love for "Do What I mean, Not What I say".
This applies both to programming languages (Perl) and
general conversations. I'm pretty sure he didn't want a
role call of who knew the answer to the question, even though
that's how it's phrased. Since we rely on a programming
language that goes out of its way to be nice to us, perhaps
we should go out of our way to be nice to other people. :)