when there is only one way to do it, then you and i will write identical code and it will be therefore easy to maintain, an idea put forward by Charles Simonyi before you were born.

perl's hodgepodge semantics do make sense if you had already lived on the cli in a perl-less world and already knew grep, sed, awk, etc. because that's where perl grabbed its ideas from and you would already be familiar with them and it would not seem like more of a hodgepodge than what you already knew.

there is more than one way to do it (semantically) is not there is more than one way to write it (syntactically) The boolean algebra of sets and the boolean algebra of logic are isomorphic (which in a strong sense is "same syntax"), but they are not semantically the same at all, is what I mean by semantics.

the point I was making has nothing to do with perl's hodge podge of semantics, i simply want to know what the semantics of Q are, and the syntax presentation in the examples hardly distinguishes its semantics from any other post algol language.

I'm not saying the language should support multiple/lax syntaxes, I'm saying that when I edit a file I should see what I like, and when you edit the file you should see what you like; I should never see what you like unless we agree to share. Same semantics, not same syntax. The syntax would not be part of the language. The fact that syntax is part of our languages is how noobs get syntax confused with semantics and then never learn that semantics are the only important thing.