So it makes print act like say?

Yes. I (perhaps not originally so) requested a say be backported to P5. I even implemented it and sent patches to p5p but they were rejected for various spurious reasons.

I used -l as a substitute in the interim, but it took such a long time that -l had become a habit by the time say became available.

When I moved to 5.10, I did try to break the habit of -l, but you have to add use feature qw[ say ]; or use 5.010; to the top of every script,and that is harder than -l, so I pretty much gave up on say. On the rare occasions I want to print without a newline, I use printf instead.