Call me bored, but don't call me boring.

It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all.

The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

Well, you can implement a Perl peek() with unpack('P',...). Once you have that, there's only security through obscurity.

There's many scripting languages in the world, Perl is a little bit special because it is based more on some ideas from the way natural languages work.

Odd that we think definitions are definitive.