So barewords were introduced with the assumption subroutine calls would always have amperands -- and as hindsight works so well, we can all see what a bad assumption that was.

(besides, you said 'Presuming no "use strict" (or the days of Perl3)')

... and I'm a newbie -- I learned from Matt's Script Archive the llama book in um...1994? 1995? using Perl 4. I've never used Perl 3.