In Perl, &#x27;.&#x27; is not property access.  I&#x27;m not trying to imply &#x27;.&#x27; is the best solution for a language where it&#x27;s already in use, but that a separate, unambiguous symbol would be better.  For example, Perl 6 moved to using &#x27;.&#x27; for calling methods, and uses &#x27;~&#x27; for concatenation.  It&#x27;s not like just changing &#x27;+&#x27; is sufficient anyway, there is still string equivalence to consider (outlined in my other replies).