It's completely different behavior depending on the type of operator.

Edit: And apparently it even respects the associativity of the operator! There is nothing gained by making the language more complicated just to cut a few characters.

If you use the operator, it's (hopefully) safe to assume you know what it does. Then you should also know what interleaving the operator between the list elements does. Which is exactly what the reduction does. I don't understand your problem with it.

yeah. i don't really get what is being gained. you have to keep some much context in your head in order to write perl - as compared to python ... it's tiring (as i keep saying)

Isn't this like complaining that '[how the hell do you escape two asterisks?]' for exponentiation is too confusing?

You're not reading what I've said, are you.

It's all about context. The more of the enclosing context you need to keep in mind to understand a line of code, the more you increase the cognitive load on the programmer.