You've thumped a big nail on the head there my friend! People new to the language never quite understand that perl started out a melange of C, awk, sed, and shell-script. Not knowing at least a little about them can slow down your understanding of many a perl quirk. Maybe we should hang a real post of this up under Meditations...

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)