However, there are some people whose mindset just tends to prefer a lot of strict rules.

Ya! That's me!

People who prefer Pascal over BASIC, if you can imagine.

*waves hands* I even started in BASIC, back in, um, Middle School? But once I got to college, and Pascal and Scheme were the order of the day, I never looked back. I’m even trying to convince a co-worker to give up Visual Basic for C#, just so we can re-write, convert, and cleanup the vast stock of VB code in our environment.

People who use strict and warnings even for one-liners and obfuscations.

Well, maybe not that much. OTOH, I don't write obfuscations; it's enough of a struggle to me to write clear code.

Those people would probably appreciate the ability to force all subs to be predefined, for example.

Actually, no. I tend to think that would make the code less clear, not more. If I recall alright, it's mostly done in other languages due to compiler needs more than anything. I'd much rather have something where subs get "auto-rendered" into POD, so it's easier to write comments on subroutines (if you so wish); I think that would be much more useful, in terms of what someone reading your code would need, than any pre-declaration concept.

*ponders finding/writing such code..."Pod::Auto, anyone?"*

The really neat thing about these pragmas, if they existed, would be that we could say, "C gives you enough rope to hang yourself, but Perl gives you enough rope to tie yourself up."

HEH. *evil grin*