Poor arguments against

I just think it's going to add another weird thing to remember when you are reading Perl. My guess is that someone really loved to be able to do substr($a, $b, $c) so they had to keep some form of it rather than force transformation to $a.substr($b, $c). This reminds me of (but is clearly less irritating) the syntactic issue with the indirect object notation, which ordinarily allows Perl to attempt to parse any sequence of barewords into some kind of (static) method invocation nonsense. In other words, I'm predisposed to think that this too is another bad idea.