&gt; Let me get this straight - the first example in the tutorial is code that you shouldn&#x27;t write. Got it.<p>If you read a little farther you might have seen this: <i>Note: .VAR and .WHAT are code smells. They’re useful to understand the language and debug, but testing against what they return is nearly always the wrong approach.</i><p>&gt; Because it looks like a &quot;piece of string&quot; ... that ties ... strings together, apparently.<p>You&#x27;re mistaking a mnemonic for the reasoning.  The reasoning is most likely because using a period for string concatenation is likely to cause problems when it&#x27;s also used for method calls and strings can have methods, and when methods can be quotes.  E.g. &quot;foo&quot;.&quot;chars&quot;(), which might be useful with string interpolation.<p>As for why it&#x27;s not +, that&#x27;s covered as well.  Perl takes the stance that operators should be different for different operation types.  What does foo + bar mean in python?  You need to know the types of foo and bar to know that.  In Perl 5 and Perl 6, you know whether you are adding numeric types or concatenating (not <i>adding</i>) strings.<p>It&#x27;s easy to assume no thought went into the development[1], but it&#x27;s been <i>very</i> well thought out and been baking for a <i>very</i> long time.  They spent that time actually testing their ideas, and making changes when reality didn&#x27;t match expectations.<p>1: for that matter, a lot of people think that about Perl 5, which is untrue, it just has different design goals than many languages