Personally I found the variable notation to be one of the more 'exotic' things about Perl. I rather like exotic things. It was neat that the variable character told Perl how to treat what you were extracting, rather than telling Perl about the container that held it. However I agree that it can get a bit hairy when you get to code like @{$thing[$c]}[$b].

I personally think Perl is losing a little of it's syntactic mystique, but from the sound of it we are getting a more magical engine, so it should still be fun. And ultimately, that's why I've stuck with Perl despite all the times I've tried to wean myself onto Eiffel, Java, etc.

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Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.