perl tries to be more human friendly; the trick is to write the code in the way that seems to best express your intent to a human reading it, and assume that th

perl tries to be more human friendly; the trick is to write the code in the way that seems to best express your intent to a human reading it, and assume that the compiler will do the right thing. Later you'll be able to work out the rules that it uses to resolve things and take advantage of them, but perl is designed for people who -don't- want to be thinking about what the compiler's doing while writing code. Alternatively, you can simply -not use- the syntax sugar and thereby avoid needing to worry about it for your own code.