That is a cool observation!

And doesn't Perl have parts of it derived from other languages (er, technically, tools with their own languages) -- sed, awk .. others?

Didn't the editing in place flag (-i) come from sed? and also these constructs s/// and y/// ?

What about any magical auto-split behavior - wasn't it inherited from awk?

As well as a thing like

BEGIN {
       ...
     }
[download]

Perl is a gumbo.