http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=525457


in reply to What operator prepends?

Really .= isn't an "append operator" it's just syntactic sugar for an assignment back to the same lvalue after using the concatenation operator, just like += is syntactic sugar for adding and assigning in one step. It's just that, unlike addition (or the other mathematical operators), concatenation isn't commutative.</pedant>

Not that it's really an answer as to why there's no prepend operator . . .