I've struggled with this kind of issue before. One of the main benefits of Perl is that TIMTOWTDI, no doubt about it. I know, it's all about context. There's nothing wrong with the rules as they are currently constitued. However, I've found in a number of cases Perl does not do the least suprising thing. The examples above show that while being incredibly flexible, there's a lot of room for a small mistake to yield far reaching, mean, nasty consequences. At what point does TIMTOWTDI make Perl code start to be less readable, and thus less maintainable?

I don't have any preconceived notions about it, I'm just asking the question.