Thank you both for cheering me up. Actually it wasn't that bad anyway. :-)

As for the ruby part: They constantly claim to be so very clean in design and everything (which perl doesn't :) and then such things annoy me. If a language was very good designed it should not allow the changing of a passed parameter without the caller explicitly allowing it IMHO, but that's probably just a matter of taste. Using just a convention is not good design because it can be avoided.
In my early C-days I "invented" a convention for myself which pretty much was OO design (without knowing anything about OO) and one would hardly find a compiler whichs tells me when I'm wrong with my own conventions *grin*

Since I (almost) always use the my ($val1,$val2) = @_;-way of passing args I'm not feeling endangered here.

Anyway, I like coding in perl most of the time (until it gets to complex datastructures), I kinda enjoy coding in ruby, too (which I do for just two weeks now) and so I'll switch desktops soon...

Regards...

Stefan