You are welcome to your opinion, but I think it's very naive of you to think that Larry Wall, with all of his education, experience, and intelligence didn't consider using "proper" mathematical notation for the absolute value function in Perl. Check out this post from Larry on the topic back in 1994. Yes, abs was added on purpose. No, it's not likely to ever change. "|" is simply too valuable a character to waste on an operation that has such limited utility as absolute value.