I realize this is an old thread, but I was asking myself the question, "Why is println not built into the perl language?". I came upon this post, and I still don't feel I have an answer.
Is this the real reason that println is not a builtin function? Then why is there a printf function? Based on the documentation, printf is equivalent of calling print with parameters.
http://perldoc.perl.org/5.10.0/functions/printf.html
"Equivalent to print FILEHANDLE sprintf(FORMAT, LIST) ..."
Perl is a language that provides one with many options to accomplish a single goal, so your reasoning makes little sense to me. I personally would love to see println added as a builtin function. I don't see any problems with a little syntactic sugar if it helps developers to be more productive.
