It still slows you down if you don't use it all the time. Unless you're someone who has been programming in perl every day for years at a time, then that line is most assuredly not something that takes 2 seconds to learn and you'll remember forever. Seeing something like that while you are reading code means you have to STOP what you were reading, patiently sort it out the syntax and refer to the documentation to be sure you haven't made any mistaken assumptions, and THEN move on. Even if that only takes a couple of minutes, it adds to the frustration level of reading code. And the point is that it is perl-specific. It doesn't happen with most other code that I have to read.