David was complaining about the ugliness of Perl syntax. The wonderful thing about Perl, of course, is that There's More Than One Way To Do It.
I bet David has never even *considered* writing the dialect of Perl presented by Damian Conway at http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html I suspect this removes many of DB's original concerns about the language's syntax. That it perhaps introduces others is unfortunate, but unavoidable. Adam
