But, paradoxically, even though it mimics human languages, humans seem rather prone to slip on Perl's use of context. In contrast, the lack of context dependance in other languages may be somewhat inconvenient but is not a banana peel. My point is to question the notion that this particular feature makes Perl somehow more in tune with the way humans think.

Funny, though, that you didn't write:

My point are to questions the notion that this particular features make Perl somehow more in tune with the way human thinks.

There are some corner cases in English where subject-verb number agreement is difficult, but I know a lot of people who do pretty well with it. Why should it be any more difficult?

Maybe it is just as difficult, and that's precisely the problem. Just because some people can learn a particular set of rules and become proficient with them doesn't mean they constitute a good system; consider the Roman numerals, for example.

For the most part I have become sufficiently accustomed to Perl's context scheme that I am not particularly inconvenienced by it, but I know many who struggle with it, and I can't help but notice the irony.

Esprit de l'escalier: Another objection to the subject-verb agreement errors analogy is that such errors are benign, in the sense that they rarely, if ever, lead to serious misunderstandings (if they did they would have been weeded out of the language long before the appearance of the first grammarians). In contrast, context-related errors in Perl are not benign.

the lowliest monk

Well, it's easy to come up with egregious examples and show how English could have been better designed, but you overgeneralize. The fact is that we rely on multimethod dispatch all the time in any natural language, and it's just a minor lexical miracle that you don't even notice that you're using homophones with different meanings:

The chicken is ready to eat.
The children are ready to eat.

In short, you're relying heavily on MMD yourself when you use overloaded words like:

appreciate well clear product clumsy combination course as makes life handle buy should use kind argument

MMD is useful because it lets you express metaphorical correspondences. To trot out the Inkling's favorite example, a "piercing sweetness" may be neither piercing nor sweet, literally speaking, but your MMD dispatcher is even smart enough to autogenerate missing methods and dispatch to them.

Yes, we humans do manage to deal with the vagaries of natural language, but I don't really see this fact as being a good defense of similar issues cropping up in artificial languages. Why do we have programming languages for developing software at all? It's because specifying the solutions to engineering problems is damned near impossible in English, at least when it comes to the nitty-gritty details. We need programming languages for the precision with which they allow us to specify the operation of systems. Anything that goes against this end ought to be considered a misfeature.

Perl only has two homographic built-ins: select and for/foreach, so that's not too bad. For/foreach actually do more or less the same thing, so I don't mind them at all, but select really was a mistake IMO.

By the way, is there difference between a homograph and polymorphism?

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

By the way, is there difference between a homograph and polymorphism?

Several. For one thing, a homograph is not necessarily also a homophone (though it can be). Also, the different versions of a homograph may be different parts of speech in some cases; as far as I am aware, polymorphism keeps the polymorphic thing as the same part of speech. Furthermore, the idea behind polymorphism, if it's done correctly, is that there is supposed to be a logical connection or parallel between the different versions of it, a way in which, although slightly different, they are "the same"; this is sometimes botched, but it's *supposed* to be there; homographs have no such qualms.

Homographs like "wind" and "fly" and "record", wherein the meanings are related, are not the nasty ones, IMO. Situations like "that" (which is used as a relative pronoun, as a demonstrative pronoun or adjective, or as a subordinating adverb, and, worst of all, is frequently elided) are the rough ones. Perl as far as I am aware does not have any such pitfalls as that; even the weirdness surrounding pieces of punctuation (notably, commas and curly braces) has nothing on "that".

---

"In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings."  — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68

Polymorphism, in my mind, refers to the ability for variances in behavior to occur under the hood. Perhaps the best example of this is virtual methods in C++ (or, in fact, the way all methods are invoked in Java). When you have a statement that invokes such methods, and you're doing it on a pointer of a base class type, you have one chunk of code that results in myriad different operations. A homograph, I think, is a bit different. In the case a homograph, you actually need to know what is happening and you have to read the entire sentence to figure that out. In the case of polymorphism, those differences are hidden to you, and in this particular context you are indifferent to them.

if foo:           # empty list [] evaluates to False
   do_something()

while foo:
   x = foo.pop()
   do_something(x)