Well, you do recall correctly. German keyboards do indeed use shiftlock not caps lock and frankly IMO its one of _the_ most annoying things that I've ever had to deal with. If you accidentally touch it everything goes capital and if you are trying to type in say a caps/numeric password you _dont_ get what you wanted anyway.

Even though I work in Germany I use either a US/Canadian keyboard or a UK keyboard. The reason I do this, despite the fact it means that in day to day use I deal with 4 different types of keyboard (I have a UK laptop as well as various desktops) is that German keyboards are unbelievably annoying to program with (at least to me) because of the placement of the various brackets which as we all know are very common in programming and especially so in Perl. On a German keyboard they are arranged

/ ( ) =    Shift
7 8 9 0    Normal
{ [ ] }    Alt Graphics
[download]

Which means if you have a construct like (localtime)[3,4,5] you have to use two different shift type keys, with the Alt-Gr key being _only_ on the right hand side. Grrr. The fact that I dont have to deal with the damn shift-lock is an added bonus.

Incidentally, I have a feeling that many of the thoughts expressed in this thread are a case of 'The Grass is Greener'.

:-)

Yves
--
You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)