This wasn't beautiful to me either, but rather ugly. I interpreted the word 'beauty' in the post as sarcasm, and it reminded me that no matter how hard I try to fight Perl prejudice in the workplace, there is some grounding to that prejudice -- it allows some funky stuff that has no place existing, and the idea of using vars like $" is a bad one if you are trying to write real software. One can only hope, once again, for Perl6 to save us all.