G'day rsFalse,

I don't know what your question is. You got a syntax error; you fixed the syntax; the error went away.

See "perlop: Auto-increment and Auto-decrement". It shows a couple of examples of whitespace between the operator and operand. These are followed by:

"Perl will not guarantee what the result of the above statements is."

You should also use these pragmata:

• strict: which would have told you that $i had not been declared.
• warnings: which would have told you that $i was uninitialised.

If you had wanted to operate on the value(s) from for, that may have alerted you to the fact that $i was the wrong variable and you should have been using $_. See "perlsyn -- Perl Syntax".