[colomon]

Let me address your last paragraph and expand a bit on what username223 said. elsif is historical from Perl 5; I think it may be related to the fact that C-style ifs require curly brackets in Perl.

my is Perl 5, is different than local, and is gloriously short. Nicest way I've ever seen to declare a variable. :)

slurp/spurt are routines to read/write an entire file at once. slurp is pretty standard in other languages, I believe, and spurt was chosen to be a natural opposite to it. Perl 6 still has open / close / read / write, etc. Though to be fair, honestly I usually use lines, which (with no other arguments) gives you a lazy list of the lines in standard input / files specified on the command line.

for in Perl 5 was some weird combo which could be iterating over an array or a C-style for. In Perl 6, those have been separated. Because iterating over an array is vastly more common, that gets the shorter keyword. The C-style loop got the loop keyword.