Then fix the documentation!

I think I should fix the scripts. I don't think that's their intended behavior.

Changing Perl because documentation of applications is incorrect or incomplete isn't the way to go.

To be clear. I don't actually propose to make this change, I understand that this would broke a lot of things including quite healthy scripts which use something like already mentioned

BEGIN {s!^(\s)!./$1!,s/^/</,s/$/\0/ for @ARGV}
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• this feature is not so useful
• it's weird and error prone
• it's make easy things harder

My point is that if you want to make "robust" scripts, that is, scripts that need to be run in a potentially untrustworthy environment, should either enable taint, or use 3-arg open. Preferably both.

Robbing Perl of a feature (and potentially breaking code) just so one can take short cuts in untrustworthy environments isn't the right thing to do.