I completely agree. $|++ gives the erroneous impression that you can somehow have nested $| setting, and I've seen people bitten by this when they think that they're still set to autoflush (because of nested increments) when they aren't. It's a bad idiom, and I'm half-tempted to make $| roll over and toggle state in perl 6. (Which I know won't happen, which is fine, the same way that perl 6 won't deliver 20kV across the keyboard of anyone who writes code like $foo ? bax($bar) ? 12 : xyzzy(34) : $x or $y ? foo() : bar() though I can but dream)