Right. What to do with the token is determined at the read head. I still do not see how this is a perl specific problem, as the "/" operator has to be read and computed, what happens with it 5 minutes from now is fortune telling. Not a perl specific problem.
Does that mean you think the tokeniser produces a <"/" operator> token? It doesn't. There's no such thing. The tokeniser produces either a regexp pattern token (which is a term) or a division operator token when faced with "/" in the input stream.