On the future of Perl 5

in my experiance with perl, if you try a construct from just about any language it will probably work, if it doesn't it will give you a syntax error (whitespace being significant is an exception)

this is both a blessing and a curse.

it's great for writing programs (especially when they really are one use), but it means that if you are looking at programs that other people wrote and have not done any thinking about code style you can run into constructs from many different languages.