Perl often lets you code the way you want to code and it is easy to abuse that, especially for the kind of "comparison" that you mentioned. It should be easy to provide counter examples. If you are concerned about how "standard" your code will look, you may want to

• use strict;
• use warnings;
• get suggestions from Perl::Critic
• get indentation and other formatting help from perltidy

Actually, the first two are more like you should, no matter what you want, until you become an expert.

Keep the questions coming. Cheers.