If you could explain, line by line, what your rationale is for the code you wrote, then perhaps we could be of further assistance in facilitating your learning process. I could write the thing for you in a couple of minutes. I've already devoted more time than that to trying to guide you in the right direction instead -- I feel no compelling need to write five lines of code that you can turn in to your teacher. My motivation is to help a newcomer get the sort of start with Perl that he or she will be able to build upon, and just writing some code for you, though it would save you and I both time this time around, won't contribute toward you becoming proficient with Perl, won't prepare you for the next assignment, and won't start someone on the path toward becoming a Perl user as time goes by.

By you going through the process of explaining line by line why you made the choices you did in writing the code, we can better understand your thought-process, and we will be able to provide you useful insights. In particular, I'd like to know if it is dictated by the assignment itself that you use split, shift, pop, and a C-style for loop. If not, those are odd choices. Was it specified in the assignment that you use a single array to represent both the tenses and the suffixes? Again, a strange choice. But we really don't know which of your design choices are required elements in the assignment, and which are all yours. ...and if all yours, why.

The most immediate problem is that you left off a closing curly brace. Curly-braces are almost always supposed to match, a left needs a corresponding right. Same with parenthesis and square brackets. If you add that to the end of your script where it belongs, the script should compile but still won't work, for some of the other reasons I enumerated in an earlier post.

Have you read perlintro? You've spent more time fiddling with code and posting here than it takes to read perlintro, and it contains about 90% of what you would need to complete your assignment. After doing that, think it through; think to yourself, "How would I solve this with pencil and paper?" Your code doesn't demonstrate that thought process. Instead, it seems more like you pulled elements out of your lecture notes and inserted them into the code without understanding what they do. Once you have a concept of how it might be solved with pencil and paper, start writing code that does that, and add nothing that doesn't move you toward that goal... well nothing aside from strict and warnings.

thank you very much .. and i do apologize again

The issue is - in my opinion - that even if you make your program run, it will still not run correctly, as it does not take into account how to deal with irregular verbs or certain well-known grammatical exceptions. If you wish to take care of that, then you will end up with a program very similar to mine.

The point here is not conjugating verbs. The student has been presented with a simplistic problem in order to develop skills in handling strings and arrays using Perl. Let's get him up to speed on for and split. If he can't master those, CPAN won't be of much use to him.

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8 (NASB)

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I understood that much. I only wanted to show that with little or no effort one could get this program to work correctly.

Of course the teacher is to blame by giving such a bad example to start with.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

My blog: Imperial Deltronics

It most certainly will not handle the verb 'be'.

It won't even handle regular verbs ending in "y".

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

My blog: Imperial Deltronics