I don't think the language design influence of Perl on Python was as strong as you imply.
I think the influence was mainly in Guido looking at Perl and realizing he wanted a language that didn't look like that.
I'm pretty sure the Guido has said that ALGOL 68 and Pascal was probably the biggest positive outside influences (together with some in-house language called ABC that he was using at the time)
When you say "that didn't look like that", are you presenting a conjecture? There was only a few years between the first release of Perl and the start of Python.
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I don't think the language design influence of Perl on Python was as strong as you imply.
I think the influence was mainly in Guido looking at Perl and realizing he wanted a language that didn't look like that.
I'm pretty sure the Guido has said that ALGOL 68 and Pascal was probably the biggest positive outside influences (together with some in-house language called ABC that he was using at the time)
When you say "that didn't look like that", are you presenting a conjecture? There was only a few years between the first release of Perl and the start of Python.
van Rossum's 1993 paper at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=51C... explicitly lists C, ABC, Modula-3, Icon, C++, and Smalltalk as influences.
The section "competitors or precursors" also includes Perl and Tcl. It does not appear these languages are influences.
The statement about Perl came from an interview with him I read.
Guido was a designer of ABC.
He implemented it. The designers were Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens, and Steven Pemberton. (Quoting Wikipedia.)