“Ahem ... this is where ‘history’ becomes ‘awkard.’”

“... and where ‘punctuation’ is ‘tortured to death.’”

You're on fire today. Thirteen pairs of unnecessary quotes in five paragraphs without actually saying anything.

sundialsvc4:

“Ahem ... this is where ‘history’ becomes ‘awkard.’”

Most likely, you are entirely-accustomed to languages in which, “the proper declaration of ‘a subroutine which had no parameters’” would, as an ordinary matter-of-course, be followed by “a positive affirmation of that fact,” e.g.: “( )”.

Furthermore, you would “ordinarily” expect that the compiler would “process all of the declarations within a particular file,” without specific regard to exactly where, within that file, those declarations actually occurred.

And so, given that all of these presumptions are, in one sense, “perfectly reasonable,” the Perl language is not like that.   That is to say, Perl’s (quite deliberate) interpretation of “the syntax that you’re used to” is not exactly the same as “what you’re used to.”

And yet, “Perl’s legendary interpretation,” although very different, is, in fact, equally valid . . .