Why the followig code is not working.

My son, let me give you some priestly advice: When you want to find out why something isn't working you first have to establish for the reader what your criteria for "working" is. In other words: what were you expecting to happen, and what really happened.

As has been noted before and I quote from the perldoc for reverse:

      reverse LIST
               In list context, returns a list value consisting of the
+ ele-
               ments of LIST in the opposite order.  In scalar context
+, con-
               catenates the elements of LIST and returns a string val
+ue with
               all characters in the opposite order.
 
                   print reverse <>;           # line tac, last line f
+irst
 
                   undef $/;                   # for efficiency of <>
                   print scalar reverse <>;    # character tac, last l
+ine tsrif
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So with that in mind, if I run the following on-liner:

perl -e 'print scalar reverse "dog" . "\n";'
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god
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Let us play... If I run the following one liner:

perl -e 'print join( ",", reverse ( split "", "dog")) . "\n";'
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g,o,d
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I hope this clears things up for you....