Well, the don't take it personally, then...

I always find that these arguments about readability degenerate into an argument for readability for a hypothetical user. Usually this user is a newbie who, apparently, is clueless about Perl idioms. So the more more the code looks like other languages, such as Java, the better.

Well, I don't buy it. The main reason why people use Perl instead of any other language, is because it makes it easier to do certain tasks than those other languages. Restricting yourself to a subset so those people coming from other languages can read it, is simply throwing away that advantage.

So, let's say I was just one step ahead of you, then... :)