Agreed! Another one to add to the list: sometimes it's easiest to just test something. Not sure about precedence? perl -MO=Deparse,-p -e ... Not sure what context something is in? sub ctx { warn wantarray ? "list\n" : "scalar\n" } Something else? Whip up a quick script using one of the Test:: modules. Data::Dumper and friends debug 75 to 95% of my problems. And so on...