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

Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.

The way I see it, if you declare something portable, you'll always be wrong, and if you declare it non-portable, you'll always be right.

When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.

There's a saying in the software design industry: "Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two."

The only reason [not to use] perl is that some sysadmins don't allow software that they didn't pay for. By all means, let them send me money if it makes them feel better.

Maybe we should take a clue from FTP and put in an option like 'print hash marks on every 1024 iterations'.