I'm looking through perlop and perlsub pages of the Perl manual. There are many references about "magic" and "magical" here (just search any of them for the "magic"). I wonder why is Perl so rich in them.

Some examples:

print ++($foo = 'zz')            # prints 'aaa'       
printf "%d: %s", $! = 1, $!      # prints '1: Operation not permitted'
use warnings; my $i; print $i++  # no warning for uninitialized value
while (my $line = <FH>) { ... }  # $line is actually tested for definedness