The choice of approaches could be made the responsibility of the programmer.

You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!. That's why we made $! such a short variable name, after all. :-)

As someone pointed out, you could have an attribute that says 'optimize the heck out of this routine', and your definition of heck would be a parameter to the …

Well, that's more-or-less what I was saying, though obviously addition is a little more cosmic than the bitwise operators.

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk…

There are probably better ways to do that, but it would make the parser more complex. I do, occasionally, struggle feebly against complexity... :-)

Q. Why is this so clumsy? A. The trick is to use Perl's strengths rather than its weaknesses.