I think all of you are wrong. I never read the manual (laziness), I always slap-dash things together as quickly as possible (impatience), and I think the damn compiler should just DWIM (hubris).

I hope a smiley wasn't required.

Seriously, though, one of the greatest things about Perl is that the learning curve is not steep. It doesn't take long before code that you think is correct actually is correct. That's probably why you soon lose the habit of looking up references. A pity, since the documentation is so easy to access from just about anywhere.