You may find the jump into the while loop more legal, if you think about it like this: you could omit the braces completely, and change the while (or redo) to an if-goto construct. The C version with the case statement is still wierd, as the C switch statement is misused, but the Perl version does not use this strange idiom. (Well, maybe you could write a case-based version in perl too, I'm not sure. The postfix when will have fall-through in perl6.)