I'm reminded of the day my daughter came in, looked over my shoulder at some Perl 4 code, and said, 'What is that, swearing?
A 'goto' in Perl falls into the category of hard things that should be possible, not easy things that should be easy.
At many levels, Perl is a 'diagonal' language.
Guilty as charged. Perl is happily ugly, and happily derivative.
Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.
Perl should remain fast and intuitive (to the extent that it is :-)
I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'.
Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.
