To be honest, I got the impression that you made a coding error

Where did you get that impression? Did I ask why it didn't work? Could you explain what could possibly have given you that impression in anything I wrote?

I get the impression that you are used to deciding what people want to do (or did do) and going off on a tangent. Example:

If you simply want a maximum amount of indentation, your logic (regardless of syntax) is wrong. When you see your output starting to zigzag across the screen, will you change your code to

This is a 2nd example in the same posting of you making assumptions about what I wanted and having no basis for doing so. You then go on to soapbox about how I should have done it. You didn't answer the original question at all but seem to be wanting to direct it onto something else entirely.

Tell me, when you write text on a page, when you get to the right-hand margin, do you then write one letter per column going down, or do you zig-zag your writing back and forth?

Most writers discover that when they push all their writing into one column, not only does it become unreadable, but they would lose any future changes in indentation. How would you propose to communicate the indent level increasing or decreasing after you've hit say, column 40 out of 80? Your suggested correction is based on your trying to fit my problem into your own problem. I don't want

simply want a maximum amount of indentation,

I want something that shows me when indentation has increased and decreased.

Then you go off into another problem about tabs and how my algorithm won't work for that? Irrelevant to my problem space -- it's debug output.

Which brings me back to the original problem where you think I made some coding mistake and want perl to change to fix it. Please explain why you think the current syntax is superior to what I suggest.

You seem to think I wrote asking for your specious advice based on my lying about the initial assumptions. That you have a propensity such doesn't mean everyone does. Some of us are honest to a fault.

What I want is for you to simplify my expression down to one single expression that needs no parentheses. I maintain that they need for parentheses in this simple expression are inherently unnecessary, and that perl requires them seems inefficient. It is an example of the lack-of-expressiveness in the language -- a lack of conciseness. Rather than doing something *useful*, it has to generate an error for a case that shouldn't be an error in the first place.