> do not need to worry about escaping quotes in strings because of the {} syntax

Perl has strong support for that: https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop#Quote-Like-Operators

You can basically use any character as a delimiter except whitespace.

All of these lines are equivalent:

    $str = 'Hello, world.';
    $str = q{Hello, world.};
    $str = q[Hello, world.];
    $str = q(Hello, world.);
    $str = q<Hello, world.>;
    $str = q|Hello, world.|;
    $str = q!Hello, world.!;
    $str = q#Hello, world.#;
    $str = q%Hello, world.%;
    $str = q=Hello, world.=;
    $str = q 7Hello, world.7;

Note that when you use a letter or number (actually any character that's legal in an identifier), you need a space after the "q".

You can also do it with other types of quotes, like double quotes (that support variable interpolation). These are equivalent:

    $var1 = 'abc'; $var2 = "Value of var1 is $var1.";
    $var1 = 'abc'; $var2 = qq[Value of var1 is $var1.];

And you can also do it with regular expression matches:

    if (/pattern/) { whatever(); }
    if (qr|pattern|}) { whatever(); }

and substitutions:

    s/pattern/replacement/;
    s|pattern|replacement|;

sed also has something similar:

    echo abc | sed -e 's/abc/def/'
    echo abc | sed -e 's#abc#def#'