Hmm. I thought it might be something like that, but now instead of a nebulous feeling that it must be something to do with returning values I actually know how it works! Very educational - thanks for the explanation. My subroutines will be grateful too.

So (just getting this straight, hoping my thought processes won't be too dull for others) in jerrygarciuh's case, if he replaces the if... else with

print "$in was not a number!"; input() unless $in =~ /\d/;
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then the subroutine will return the number of characters chomped from $in, rather than $in itself. So in order to reduce the if... else loop to a single line, one wd have to do something like

sub input {
    my $arrayref=shift;
    print "\nSo far you've guessed @$arrayref."
          if $arrayref;
    print "\nWhat is your guess?\n";
    chomp <STDIN>;
    my $in=<STDIN>;
    print "$in wasn't a number!";input() unless $in =~ /\d/;
}
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Would that work? Is it nicer? Have I learnt something from this exchange? (The answer to at least one of these questions is "yes".)

§ George Sherston