If I could upvote this a few more times, I would.

If Perl is consistently working in a way in which you don't expect it, perhaps it's not Perl that is off. {grin}

There's this frequent contributor to P5P and the Usenet newsgroups who kept saying things like "counter intuitive" for many of the features which distinguish Perl from other languages. Eventually, reading those posts became tiresome, because it became obvious that this person would just never be satisfied until Perl was completely in sync with their internal model of "the world". That's sad. Sometimes, it's about looking around and poking at things until you get your model in sync with the world instead.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker