What you're suggesting is a return to The Bad Old Days, when module authors couldn't even count on arrays starting at 0 because you might have changed $[. That sort of thing is frowned on these days, because it made writing modules totally unmanageable. A module author has every right to expect that magic variables like $/ will be at their default values and a programmer who fails to localize changes in these variables is the one at fault for the trouble caused.