That’s just playing around with the same reserved variables I spoke of before and there is nothing magical about them aside their silly name. In fact the opposi

That’s just playing around with the same reserved variables I spoke of before and there is nothing magical about them aside their silly name. In fact the opposite is true, they’re actually predictable and well documented. They just happen to have terse names as a throwback to command line usage (eg you wouldn’t call $1 a magic variable in Bash because it happens to work the same as ARGV[1]). In fact in Perl, you can opt for longer, readable, lexicon over the terse single character variables; and that’s literally how modern Perl should be written. Whereas the problems described with YAML is where it can automatically alter your data based on what the parser “thinks” the data should represent. Which is generally what people mean when they talk about “magic” in IT: systems that don’t honour your input and instead automatically convert it into something else. Perl doesn’t do this even in spite of it looking like executable line noise to many.