When you're speaking to another programmer, explaining what a bit of your code is trying to do, do you speak in mathematical notation? I doubt it. I don't think

When you're speaking to another programmer, explaining what a bit of your code is trying to do, do you speak in mathematical notation? I doubt it. I don't think even mathematicians do that. If you want a well-expressed explaination for why Perl's approach is a good idea, you should read what Larry Wall has written about it. All I can really say is that it worked really well for me and my team for many years. We rarely misunderstood each other's intent, even though our code reviews were mostly just reading commit diffs.