The problem is not that it uses whitespace, it's that the amount of whitespace has semantic meaning.
It doesn't quite change the semantic meaning, but Perl thinks the programmer uses the amount of whitespace to have different semantic meaning: 
$ perl -wcle 'print("foo")'      # 0 spaces
-e syntax OK
$ perl -wcle 'print ("foo")'     # 1 space
print (...) interpreted as function at -e line 1.
-e syntax OK
$ perl -wcle 'print  ("foo")'    # 2 spaces
-e syntax OK

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In reply to Re^3: Perl fan being tempted with Python by Anonymous Monk
in thread Perl fan being tempted with Python by jeyroz

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