Thank you all for the extensive info as well as web links. I've had a serious mental block with this stuff. When I first started studying programming last year, Perl became almost an addiction. I felt in tune with the logical flow of the language. Not so, anymore. The deeper I go, the more it seems like an extensive patchwork of tricks to do jobs which Larry didn't really didn't intend for it to do. Perhaps that's the reason for Perl 6? -to get rid of the tricks and start over with a language that logically flows where you want it to go?