As just another Perl hacker, your "not real Perl" made me laugh. And no, let me reassure you that that snippet of line-noise is not, in fact, syntactically valid Perl after all.
...you have to transpose a couple of characters for that:
cat nocarrier.pl
!$#foo->_%[]
perl -c nocarrier.pl
nocarrier.pl syntax OK
(And yes, that genuinely does make me love Perl a tiny bit more. I guess you and I are just different that way, and that's OK.)