Yes, but Perl 5 did not, except for constant functions. Either way, the effect of that was outweighed by several orders of magnitude by the rest of the WTFs in that code.

All that is a bit beside the point I was trying to make, which is write readable code.

Use your own judgement to find a balance between readability and performance. Use profiling tools to find hotspots where performance is a concern and optimize those. Base your practices on evidence not dogma.