How come Perl operators have different precedence than C operators?
Actually, they don’t; all C operators have the same precedence in Perl as they do in C. The problem is with a class of functions called list operators, e.g. print, chdir, exec, system, and so on. These are somewhat bizarre in that they have different precedence depending on whether you look on the left or right of them. Basically, they gobble up all things on their right.