You're absolutely correct - the variables are just holding strings.

I was beginning to wonder the same thing about having multiple . operators in the same statement, so I checked out my script a little more. There are places where I have multiple concatenation operators, but those statements consist of all variables, such as:

$script = $select . $from . $where . $order_by;
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Maybe it has something to do with multiple concatenations involving both literals and variables? Not altogether sure. Could be worth investigating on a *NIX platform (to make sure it's not ActivePerl specific).

Thanks! MrCromeDome