As a bit of trivia, Perl actually happens to be impossible to parse http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393
Not actually true otherwise no Perl code could be run at all :)
A more accurate description would be - Perl cannot be parsed unambiguously without runtime information.
For more detailed|interesting discussion about that Perlmonks post see this HN submission from 3 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=761103
You don't want the surface area of your programming language confined to 1) runtime 2) being run by a specific binary. Where is the offline tooling? Where is the variety?
This handicap makes me despise Perl. And I say that as a long time professional Perl engineer.
>being run by a specific binary
That's a not so appealing argument in particular case of Perl which level of reverse compatibility is hard to beat.
Also, what does reverse compatibility have to do with ease of parsing?
So, whether ease of parsing is a goal per se, or serve some purpose - what such a purpose can be in particular case of Perl?
Something like that is pretty much the worst imaginable thing to happen in language design, especially because we know at least since Chomsky, Rice and Turing how to do better.
And why that information may be valuable? You cannot say anything about whether it works or it doesn't. "This is valid C++ code, but it dumps a core on null pointer dereference here and there." -- is that information very useful? How exactly?
I see an only one ephemerical goal that was a Holy Grail for academia and static analysis was primarily developed to approach it -- formal verification. But it's dead and buried outside an academia and noone cried at the funeral.
You just can't imagine how incredibly ridiculous it appears to the non-US world to use “academic” as a slur.