There are rumours that perl has initially really just been an experiment to prove that a program can be written only by using the preprocessor. It eventually failed and that's the reason why you'll occasionally find a few lines of C code sprinkled in between the preprocessor directives.

Tassilo v. Parseval
<c6em52$avdtc$1@ID-231055.news.uni-berlin.de>

sub configuration {
    my %options = @_;
    print "Maximum verbosity.\n" if $options{VERBOSE} == 9;
}
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---

if ($something_went_awry) {
    return if defined wantarray;  # good, not void context.
    die "Pay attention to my error, you danglesocket!!!\n";
}
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Programming Perl 3rd ed.
Wall, Christiansen & Orwant

Tell you what. Let's just issue a mandatory warning at the startup of every Perl s‎crip‎t that says: "Don't be stupid."

Larry Wall