So, what value do you see in advocating this model?

In a phrase: Conceptual simplicity.

That's the obvious answer. But I was hoping for more of a demonstration of benefit in the answer. Simplicity has positives and negatives, as well as various levels. On the simplest level, you can think of perl having both scalar and list values, and describe what different operations do with them. I think this encourages mistakes like $foo{bar} = (1,2,3); and @baz = [1,2,3];. The biggest reason I see for moving to a less simple (but still inaccurate!) model of "no such thing as a list in scalar context" is that I think it encourages more of an "operators provide context to their operands" pattern of thought that is the basis for really understanding what you are doing when you code perl. Of course, it would be great if everyone could shed even that level of simplicity, but that's asking a bit much.

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