I'm not defending the sigils because they are terrible, but the reason you can't just get rid of them is that they are actually used. For instance: my @arr =

I'm not defending the sigils because they are terrible, but the reason you can't just get rid of them is that they are actually used. For instance: my @arr = ("Larry", "Moe", "Curly"); my $len = @arr; will store 3 in $len. Application codebases and libraries make use of this kind of thing everywhere. You can find some of the reasoning why in interesting essays like this: http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html http://www.wall.org/~larry/natural.html Larry Wall was trying to incorporate some natural language features in Perl, unsuccessfully in this case but I would say it went very well in others.