1: Naked blocks. You can use naked blocks for quite a number of purposes. They can be used to scope (lexical/my) variables, which is what I normaly use them for. You can also use the loop control operators (next,redo,last...) on them, and build your own loop that operates exactly how /you/ want it to.

2: I can think of several reasons. One is using a m// where an eq would do -- regexes are /expensive/. Also, interpolating a variable into a regex will use the regex metachars in the interpolated variable as such, which is normaly not what you want.

3: next takes you directly to the next iteration of the loop. You can call it only once per iteration (obviously), but as many places as you want.... for example:

 while (1) {
  print "a";
  next;
  print "b";
  next;
  exit;
 }
[download]