I guess I was trying to say that I don't think that permitting cut'n'paste is itself the motivating factor for the change. I got the impression from Damian's comments that it's about reducing one factor that might daunt (does daunt?) Veebians, Javanese, etc. when trying to use Perl, by giving in to the common convention.

Also, now that I think about it, I don't think there's anything wrong with using example code, and I don't think that's the same as cargo cult. Everyone does it from time to time (raise your hand if you own the Cookbook) especially when starting out on a new topic. The question is, will you stop with that? Will you let the example persist unmodified into production, without bothering to figure out what it's doing?

I think this is mostly a matter who you are - whether you've got the drive to understand, and take pride in your work. I think it was Socrates who said "The unexamined code is not worth executing", but there are plenty of people who wouldn't properly examine their code no matter what language they're using. Making conversion of VB code into Perl easier, by itself, IMHO, won't encourage cargo cult any more than the Cookbook does now.

-- Frag.