Yes that is exactly what I got. "In the beginning there was , in the end there will be ." As to the reason, the only thing I thought at first was that as far as I have learned "$_" and "@_" are actually similar to 'argv' in C. Since, we had not passed any parameters to the script nothing was printed out. So I tried that passing two parameters to the script when I ran it. However, as I am sure you know, nothing changed. I have considered that maybe the word 'nothing' is similar to declaring something null, however, I can not find anything to back this up. Does not @_ mean the same thing as @ARGV, that these are the arguments passed to a script? So that if I pass two arguments they will reside in $_[0] and $_[1]? So in effect about the only thing I can conclude at the moment (and I don't particularly like my answer) is that when we state @_ = qw(alpha omega); we are overwriting the first two parameters (if any were passed) and then in the second line, $_ = qw(nothing nothing); setting them both to null. So in effect we set two values, set them to null and then print them out. Am I close?