Strokes for folks. I use regexen vastly more often than substr and I almost never use index. Maybe you grew up with some other language (Visual Basic maybe?) and haven't actually learned to use Perl in an idiomatic way? Perl encourages a plethora of paradigms for solving problems. The flip side is Perl doesn't do much to discourage hauling less appropriate "comfort coding practices" from other languages. That is no reason to assume that all Perl users abuse Perl in the same way you do, or have as much trouble typing statement terminators
Optimising for fewest key strokes only makes sense transmitting to Pluto or beyond
