Well, it's kind of you to say that, but given the fact that Perl 6 changed
=~ to
~~, it arguably
was a design error.
(Though this particular failure mode is not why it was changed, but rather the failure of reversing the operator to say
~= instead. It doesn't matter if you reverse
~~.)
Anyway, if you split
~~ in Perl 6 with whitespace, it'll parse, but will likely give you a "useless use of
~ in void context" warning.
By the way, Perl 6 also fixes the "print (4+5)*20" faq...