> and references, that broke all the logic implicit on the sigils.
They don't break the logic, they just follow different logic than many people assume. Either you're indicating a collection (a hash or array), or you're indicating an item. @ is a plurality indicator, while $ is an individual indicator. You reference the single item of the @foo array with $foo[0] for the same reason you say "the first apple of the bunch" instead of "the first apples of the bunch" when you want the first one. Yes, it's probably better not done that way (it's not something you can usefully change in Perl 5 at this point), but it does follow well defined rules, apparently just not the ones you assumed.
Implicit variables can usually be avoided (except for $_, but that's pretty normal these days, and I'm pretty sure it topical variables didn't begin with Perl), and often they're lexical so usually other people's code messing with them is contained. Except for $_ itself which isn't lexical, which is it's own story and a pain point. :/
They don't break the logic, they just follow different logic than many people assume. Either you're indicating a collection (a hash or array), or you're indicating an item. @ is a plurality indicator, while $ is an individual indicator. You reference the single item of the @foo array with $foo[0] for the same reason you say "the first apple of the bunch" instead of "the first apples of the bunch" when you want the first one. Yes, it's probably better not done that way (it's not something you can usefully change in Perl 5 at this point), but it does follow well defined rules, apparently just not the ones you assumed.
Implicit variables can usually be avoided (except for $_, but that's pretty normal these days, and I'm pretty sure it topical variables didn't begin with Perl), and often they're lexical so usually other people's code messing with them is contained. Except for $_ itself which isn't lexical, which is it's own story and a pain point. :/