This is somewhat embarassing, since I'm sure the answer to this question is to be found in many good perl books. But I suspect the answer is probably pretty simple to someone who has the "perl mentality", so I'm hoping your replies will aid me in gaining said mentality. I used to program Tcl, and since changing to perl, often find myself wanting an 'lsearch' function. I tend to add it so:

sub lsearch {
  my $item = shift;
  my @array = @_;
  foreach (0..$#array) {
    if ($item eq $array[$_]) {
      return $_;
    }
  }
  return "";
}

# Want to remove $item from @list
unless (my $index = lsearch($item, @list) eq "") {
  splice(@list, $index, 1);
}
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I think that in some cases where I used to use 'lsearch', I could now be using 'grep', but what do you do when you want the index of an item in your list? Or do you just program to avoid such cases?