Your example replacements are insufficient, because in those cases the string must be printed with a newline.

For 'print first arg', for example, it should be:

  print shift, "\n"
(or maybe:
  print "$ARGV[0]\n"
)
[download]

giving a length of 17 (or maybe 18), exactly the same as (or maybe more than) the score attributed. In the context of a larger program neither '-l' nor 'shift' would likely be reasonable, so you could say the writer has been generous to perl here.

Hugo