You asked
"comment on why this node is
bad...", and i think it would help you to know. From what i can tell, the reason people might down vote this is because perl has a set of internal functions which do the same thing much faster.
sprintf and
printf. The post prior to yours points this out. While i am sure most of us at some point have written code similar to yours, i imagine people down-voted it because the post prior haad a faster, cleaner solution. Don't let this discourage you ... read up on (s)printf for the next time ... this is how we all learn it.
$ perl -e 'do() || ! do() ;'
Undefined subroutine &main::try