I try to hide it, but my first love was Dylan and I'm a functional programmer at heart. It often frustrates me that I can't use the return values of chomp, s, pop, etc. to chain operations/functions.

Had I the capability to turn back the clock and influence Larry in his language decisions, I would vote for the operators like the above to return the value that they now modify in place, and for each to have a bang complement (e.g. chomp!) that works the way the current ones do. Ruby does this to some extent.

tchrist has been known to say similar things, based on his observations of what people new to the language expect. See, for example, this perl6 post. I can't see a change like this really happening -- it would affect too many scripts.

-dlc